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
Transformer Co-Inventor Noam Shazeer Defects from Google DeepMind to OpenAI

Transformer Co-Inventor Noam Shazeer Defects from Google DeepMind to OpenAI

The man whose name is in ‘Transformer’ has moved to the company behind GPT, signaling a major shift in AI talent wars.

June 18, 2026 · 2 min · 405 words · Rajesh