Etched - Building AI Hardware to Make Inference Faster and Cheaper - [Invest Like the Best, EP.480]

My guests today are Gavin Uberti and Rob Wachen, the founders of Etched. 

A few years ago, when they set out to build a better AI chip than the largest companies in the world, almost everyone I called told me it could not be done. They have since done it, taping out a working chip on their first attempt and becoming the first hardware company founded after ChatGPT to do so.

They already have more than a billion dollars of customer demand for their first product, and have raised eight hundred million dollars to build it. 

Etched builds chips and systems designed to run AI models faster and at lower cost. They started the company in 2023, and that product is a complete rack for inference, the chip along with the boards, the power delivery, the interconnects, and the manufacturing to produce it all.

We talk about the technical bets behind their architecture, how they hired industry legends and paired them with elite 22 year-olds, and why they believe inference will become one of the largest markets in the world.

I think you will find the story of what they have built hard to forget.

Please enjoy my conversation with Gavin and Rob.

For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. 

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Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant.

Timestamps:

(00:00:00) Welcome to Invest Like The Best

(00:02:07) Gavin Uberti and Rob Wachen

(00:03:54) Two 21-Year-Olds Taking on NVIDIA

(00:07:52) The Two Technical Bets Behind Their Architecture

(00:14:15) Why Inference Becomes the Biggest Market

(00:20:23) Rob and Gavin's Origins Stories

(00:28:38) How They Recruit Industry Legends

(00:36:30) Moving a Dozen Engineers to Bangalore for Six Months

(00:38:01) Speed Wins

(00:43:58) Getting More Concurrency Out of Every Megawatt

(00:52:44) Vertical Integration

(00:57:43) Hardest Obstacles to Overcome

(01:01:09) Raising The Largest AI Chip Series A Ever

(01:06:29) TSMC

(01:13:20) Designing Gen 2 for Gigawatt-Scale Production

(01:16:42) Why Machines Don't Think Like People

(01:20:03) A Year of Compute Compressed Into a Month

(01:23:44) The Trillion-Dollar Data Center

(01:26:19) The Kindest Thing