The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 25 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Wachen: The Largest Token Producer Will Be the World's Most Valuable Company
“Whoever produces the most tokens is going to be the most valuable company in the world.”
Wachen: Etched hardware achieves 10x higher user concurrency at equal interactivity
“So when people are doing that evaluation, our hardware is going to generally be able to get you an order of magnitude more concurrency at a given level of interactivity.”
Wachen: Etched is the only startup building custom racks and chips
“We're actually, I think we're the only startup right now that's building its own rack as well as its own chips.”
Wachen: The semiconductor stack is over-buffered for general-purpose use cases
“The entire semiconductors and data center industry is built on buffer. And what I mean by that is every part of the stack from the EDA tools to the power modules, to the circuit boards, to the chip design and standard cells, everything is built to be general p…”
Wachen: Inference clusters will quickly scale to tens of thousands of chips
“And, you know, the inference side, you know, today people usually think about it as an eight chip cluster, or maybe just, you know, NVL as the scale up domain but very quickly, this is going to become thousands of chips and tens of thousands of chips.”
Wachen: Etched ran rack inference in 40 days versus rival's 10 months
“There is another very famous AI chip company that took 10 months to go from getting their silicon back to having them running inference in Iraq. And this was like publicly announced to their investors and it was a really big deal. We were able to do it in 40 d…”
Wachen: Etched AI chip operates at under half the voltage of rivals
“We're now bringing forward our first generation of this low voltage inference technology Which is running at under half the voltage of any other AI chip.”
Wachen: AI inference will become the biggest market in the world
“It feels like we are on a, like, decade march for inference to become, you know, the biggest market in the world.”
Wachen: Society Faces a Multi-Decade AI Token Supply Shortage
“We are in a new era of intelligence where the cost of producing intelligence is dramatically so much cheaper than the value of the intelligence that we are in a many year, probably many decade supply shortage of these tokens.”
Wachen: EDA tools default to freezing temperature constraints irrelevant to AI
“You know, the default configurations for a lot of these EDA tools assume that you're going to be running your chips in freezing temperatures. Now, I don't know about you, but I've never seen an AI data center with ice in it. So, you know, we can feel pretty co…”
Wachen: Codex got GPT-OSS running overnight from Etched docs alone
“And we had Codex actually get GPT-OSS running from scratch just based off of our docs completely by itself. And it did it, I think, overnight.”
Wachen: Etched first-gen chip avoided Rubin supply chain by using 4nm
“And that's why actually for our first gen product, we built it on a different supply chain than the Rubens. So, you know, we're on four nanometer Rubens on three nanometer, you know, we're on a different HPM than Rubens and so forth.”
Wachen: Semiconductor physical design vendor agreements cost at least $40M–$50M
“We needed to sign an agreement with a physical design vendor, which, you know, will cost you at least 40, fifty million dollars.”
Wachen: Serving global AI tokens requires three specific chip primitives
“Fundamentally, if you want to run a majority of tokens in the world, you need to do three things. You need to build a chip with the most flops, And given power budget, you need to build a chip that has the lowest latency between other chips. So the biggest sca…”
Uberti: Synopsys allowed Etched multi-year deferred payment for emulators
“Synopsis actually went ahead and let us get some of their emulators on extremely favorable terms where we pay over many years.”
Uberti: Compute costs will drop faster than memory costs due to DRAM limits
“Generally, loading data is very expensive, and doing math is very cheap. And as time goes on, you'll end up finding that math gets cheaper at a rate that is faster than memory gets cheaper, due to this fundamental limit on any kind of DRAM device.”
Wachen: Etched emulated full reticle chip on 700 FPGAs before silicon
“We took over 700 FPGAs and put the entire full reticle chip on an FPGA cluster and ran a dozen different models with our full inference stack on them before the chips came back.”
Uberti: Employees quit Etched over deemed unsolvable chip design problem
“We had people quit. That people literally were like, this problem is unsolvable, and, ah, best of luck guys.”
Uberti: High-speed AI decode is bottlenecked by data movement, not math
“When you do this sort of kernel's work, what you realize is that the math is relatively easy. But to get high speed decode, the thing that matters is data movement. Almost all the work that you do is optimizing how do you move data around a single chip or acro…”
Uberti: AI Token Serving Requires Non-Linear Cluster Scaling Economics
“That the way you want this to scale is not that, oh, if I want to go serve 10 times more tokens, I buy 10 times more servers. It must be some solution where if I want to serve 10 times more tokens, then I get some economies of scale benefit with my say cluster…”
Uberti: TSMC funded an experiment on Etched's recommendation and updated its line
“TSMC customer service is way, way better than I have seen at any other company in any other industry. It's the kind of thing where if you say, hey, you can approve your yield by making this change, you can go make them a recommendation, and then we'll go run a…”
Wachen: Etched hired dozens from HFT over shared kernel-first philosophy
“And we've had dozens of people from high frequency trading join the team because they saw this philosophy too.”
Uberti: TSMC VP Emailed Wanting to Partner with Etched After One Dinner
“And the following day, I get an email from TSMC saying, Gavin, I want to work with Etched. Find a way to make it happen.”
Uberti: Etched sent a dozen engineers to Bangalore to fix delays
“We went out and shipped a dozen of our top engineers across the world to Bangalore for six months. I was there as well. I lived in Bangalore for four and a half months personally”
Uberti: Etched aligned two clock signals to within 50 picoseconds
“We realized there was one and only one way to solve it. As we had to go line up two clock signals on our chip to within 50 picoseconds. That is literally 50 trillionths of a second. And we had to go get these signals aligned to this super small granularity and…”