Building specialized AI inference hardware for the next generation of embodied intelligence.
Etched is an American AI semiconductor company developing purpose-built inference chips optimized exclusively for transformer-based models. Rather than designing general-purpose GPUs, the company focuses on specialized hardware that delivers significantly higher performance and lower latency for large language models and multimodal AI workloads by tailoring its architecture to transformer computation. While not a robotics company, Etched occupies an important position within the embodied AI ecosystem. Its inference hardware is designed to accelerate the real-time reasoning, perception, and multimodal processing required by autonomous robots, making it a potential compute platform for next-generation humanoids and other intelligent machines that rely on fast, onboard AI inference.
In October 2024, Etched and Decart released Oasis, an interactive world model designed to be highly optimized for Sohu. The demo became Etched’s clearest public example of co-designing models and products around its hardware roadmap.
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Jess AlvarezEtched was founded in 2022 around the view that transformers would dominate AI workloads and that the architecture was stable enough to hardwire into a dedicated inference chip. The company began building Sohu as a rack-scale system optimized around that assumption.
In June 2024, Etched described Sohu as the world’s first specialized ASIC for transformers and argued that custom silicon would be required to deliver a major leap in tokens per dollar for large-scale production inference.
In October 2024, Etched and Decart released Oasis, an interactive world model designed to be highly optimized for Sohu. The demo became Etched’s clearest public example of co-designing models and products around its hardware roadmap.
