AMD unveiled Helios, a rack-scale system for training and running large AI models, competing directly with Nvidia's existing offerings in data centers. The system will launch later in 2025 with major customers including Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic already committed to deployment at gigawatt scale. AMD projects the AI accelerator market will reach $1.4 trillion by 2030, approaching the size of today's entire semiconductor industry.
Sequoia Capital is leading a $300 million Series C investment in Etched, a hardware startup building custom silicon optimized for AI inference, at a $10 billion pre-money valuation. Etched completed its first chip tape-out at TSMC in 2026 and brought up a production cluster running inference on frontier AI models within 40 days, achieving Pareto dominant performance on throughput-latency benchmarks. The company's inference-specific hardware system enables customers to deploy AI models with optimized speed and throughput across diverse architectures including sparse MoEs, dense transformers, and alternative designs like Mamba.
Etched, an AI chip startup founded by Harvard dropouts, raised $300 million in Series C funding at a $10.3 billion valuation from investors including Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz. The company doubled its valuation in seven months and has booked $1 billion in orders after successfully manufacturing chips designed to accelerate AI model inference through specialized prefill and decode components. The funding validates Etched's approach to building transformer-optimized chips as a viable alternative to general-purpose AI processors, moving the company closer to mass production and wider market deployment.
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