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Etcheds valuation doubles to $21B in a month
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Etched on Tuesday announced that it has raised another $700 million at a $21 billion valuation, led by Jane Street after the famed quant fund tested and bought the startup’s AI hardware. Even by AI standards, this valuation step-up is jaw-droppingly fast. Etched was valued at $5 billion in December. It raised a $300 million Series C at a $10.3 billion valuation in July. Now investors have doubled its valuation to $21 billion, up nearly $11 billion, in a month. Etched delivers its AI tech as full systems that it calls “frontier inference clusters.” (Etched competitor Nvidia calls its full systems AI factories). Co-founder and COO Robert Wachen told TechCrunch that investors are so enthusiastic because Etched has designed two new components from scratch to speed up inference — the computing process that happens after a user submits a prompt. “Inference is built in two stages,” Wachen said, “prefill and decode.” In the mathematically and compute-intensive “prefill phase,” the system must understand the prompt, including context. In the memory-intensive “decode” phase, the system generates output tokens, meaning the actual answer the user sees. Etched created a prefill chip that operates at low voltage, allowing it to pack in more transistors without the typical heat problems of other high-end AI chips. It can therefore process more tokens faster. Etched created a new type of memory and an interconnect for the decode process that the company calls cluster-scale memory. “It allows many chips to connect together and use a shared memory pool at a very, very fast, low latency,” Wachen said. The result, Etched promises, is higher speeds and lower costs. Etched is still battling the perception from its early days that it etches a particular model into its chips, meaning that each chip is somehow custom-designed to run one frontier model. That was its original intention, but is no longer the case. Etched’s systems can run any frontier model. In the blog post announcing the new round, investment firm Jane Street said “We tested the chip and are pleased with the early results. Etched’s unique approach to inference delivers the precision we will need to support our most demanding workloads. We’re excited to now have our own rack running in our datacenter.” Other investors in Etched include Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel, Tiger Global, Bain Capital Ventures, Neo, Stripes, Primary, Positive Sum, Diffusion, Argo, and Blackstone. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
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The big screen is having a moment. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is breaking box office records, while Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has people dusting off Homer for the first time since high school. But television is keeping pace with a slate of can’t-miss new releases and beloved old favorites that are worth revisiting.While plenty of outlets will tell you what everyone is watching (see: Ted Lasso), that’s not our goal. As always, the TV shows we’re watching this month reflect the kinds of stories WIRED covers every day—shows that explore technology, science, politics, culture, and the sometimes unsettling ways they intersect.From prestige dramas to absurd comedies and one truly groundbreaking sci-fi series, these are the TV shows we think are worth making time for this month.Star Trek: The Original SeriesOn September 8, 1966, science fiction changed forever with the premiere of the original Star Trek TV series. In the 60 years since, Gene Roddenberry’s ahead-of-its-time tale of the USS Enterprise crew’s journeys into deep space has spawned dozens of films, TV series, and video games, plus hundreds of books and comics—not to mention a number of real-world tech innovations. The legendary series has also shaped pop culture in countless other ways, giving us everything from Vulcan salutes and Klingons to the Prime Directive and the immortal command to “beam me up.”Whether you’re a lifelong Trekkie or a curious newcomer, there’s never been a better time to see where one of television’s most influential franchises began. Though it ran for just three seasons, Star Trek: The Original Series left an outsized legacy, breaking barriers with one of television’s first interracial kisses, featuring a remarkably diverse cast at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, and inspiring generations of scientists, engineers, and storytellers to imagine a more optimistic future. Sixty years later, its blend of adventure, social commentary, and boundless curiosity remains as compelling as ever. Best of all, Paramount+ is home to nearly every corner of the Star Trek universe, from the beautifully remastered original series to its many spinoffs and feature films. If you’re celebrating the franchise’s 60th anniversary, there’s no better place to boldly go back to where it all began.FuturamaFollowing a decade-long hiatus, Futurama made a triumphant comeback in 2023, complete with gags about The Twilight Zone and “Momazon” drone deliveries. Created by Matt Groening and David X. Cohen, the animated sci-fi comedy is set in the 31st century and follows the employees of the Planet Express delivery company as they stumble through bizarre adventures, alien encounters, and laugh-out-loud takes on everything from AI to corporate greed.On August 3, the series kicked off its 14th season, which delivers more of the razor-sharp tech satire and surprisingly thoughtful science that have long made it one of television’s smartest comedies.President CurtisThis summer is a particularly ripe moment for fans of irreverent animated sci-fi, as it also brings President Curtis, a new spinoff set in the Rick and Morty universe. While Futurama looks ahead at the possibilities—and absurdities—of the distant future, President Curtis takes a stranger route, following President Andre Curtis (voiced by Emmy-winning baritone Keith David) and his eccentric staff as they navigate interdimensional diplomacy, paranormal investigations, and other bizarre crises. The 10-episode series, which premiered on July 26, airs new episodes each Sunday night on Adult Swim, which then drop on HBO Max on Monday.LanternsDC is taking its Green Lanterns in a decidedly darker direction with Lanterns, a new series that trades traditional superhero spectacle for a cosmic murder mystery. Starring Kyle Chandler as Hal Jordan and Aaron Pierre as John Stewart, the series follows the two Lanterns as they investigate a mystery that stretches across Earth and beyond.With Lost cocreator Damon Lindelof, True Detectiv
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