**[Etched Valuation Doubles to $21 Billion in One Month: Jane Street Leads Investment and Purchases Chips]** Beating AI News Flash: AI chip startup Etched is raising $700 million at a $21 billion valuation, led by quantitative trading giant Jane Street. Less than a month ago, the company completed a $300 million funding round at a $10.3 billion valuation, nearly doubling its valuation. The three founders are all just 24 years old, and Etched currently has approximately 400 employees, about 15% of whom are from Nvidia. Etched has progressed from chip development to actual product shipments. Jane Street has also become the first customer, purchasing full machine racks equipped with Etched AI accelerator chips. The company’s cumulative orders have exceeded $1 billion and deliveries have already begun. Etched focuses on AI inference, designing chips, memory, interconnects, and servers together. The company claims its "cluster-level memory" architecture enables faster data exchange between multiple chips, with some communication tasks achieving latency of approximately 700 nanoseconds, compared to Nvidia Blackwell's 4,000 nanoseconds. To accelerate mass production, the company has even built a 2MW data center in its office and established its own server component factory in Taiwan. After the first batch of test chips returned from TSMC, Etched completed AI inference workloads in just 44 days. [Original Link]