Etched's Sohu Chip: A Transformer-Specific Bet That Just Raised $800 Million

Etched's Sohu Chip: A Transformer-Specific Bet That Just Raised $800 Million

Etched emerged from stealth today with $800 million in funding and over $1 billion in signed customer contracts, unveiling its Sohu chip – an ASIC designed exclusively for transformer inference. The move signals a growing push to build domain-specific hardware for large language models, potentially reshaping the AI chip market.

July 1, 2026 · 3 min · 516 words · Rajesh