Breaking

Thiel's Selby Backs Etched via Arizona Chip Ties

July 2, 2026 at 18:02 EDT

Funding & M&A
Infra & Chips
Foundation Models

Jack Selby, a Managing Director at Thiel Capital, has taken stakes in hot startups including AI chip maker Etched through his VC fund Copper Sky Capital (formerly AZ-VC). His access was rooted in connections to Arizona's semiconductor industry, according to reporting by TechCrunch.

Founded 2022 · Etched

A Transformer-only chip bets on beating the GPU at its own game

Etched's Sohu ASIC strips away general-purpose flexibility to run one thing — Transformer inference — hitting a $5B valuation and roughly $1B in booked orders on the strength of its speed claims.

$5B

Post-money valuation after a $500M round

~$1B

In booked orders secured

$800M+

Total funding raised to date

Sohu's throughput claim, per 8-chip server

Company-reported peak figures on Llama 70B; broad third-party verification still pending.

H100 server

1×

B200 server

~2×

Sohu server

~20×

Etched claims ~20× an H100 server and ~10× a B200 server — up to ~500,000 tokens/sec.

Process

TSMC 4nm (N4P)

A0 silicon validating with customers

Memory

144GB HBM3E

~1.8× the bandwidth of H100

The bull case

Specialized design promises faster, cheaper, lower-power inference
Could cut the cost of running frontier models
Bundled "frontier inference clusters" of racks + software

The caution

Transformer-only offers little flexibility
Large models require multiple chips
Peak claims; sustainability & software ecosystem unproven
Mass production and broad deployment still ahead

Backed by a deep bench

Founded by Harvard dropouts and Thiel Fellows, Etched draws capital from Peter Thiel, Ribbit Capital, Stripes, Jane Street, Hudson River Trading and Two Sigma — and endorsements from researchers Andrej Karpathy, Geoffrey Hinton and Fei-Fei Li — as it positions itself as a counterweight to Nvidia.

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