The new AI chip company Etched faces skepticism: Behind the $21 billion valuation, performance has yet to be verified by a third party

AI chip startup Etched recently completed a $700 million financing round at a valuation of $21 billion, but its technology claims are facing industry skepticism. The well-known hacker George Hotz's AI computing team, the tiny corp, publicly criticized Etched's marketing approach: there are many investors, orders, and hardware photos, but there is too little third-party data to truly verify performance.

Etched's core selling point is LVI (Low Voltage Inference) technology, claiming it allows trillion-parameter sparse MoE chips to run at over 80% of theoretical peak computing power (MFU). Chip design professional Wesley Yue raised technical doubts about this: high MFU does not necessarily represent absolute performance—if the chip's peak computing power is low, even with an 80% utilization rate, actual performance may still lag behind competitors. Yue believes that Etched's design "does not make sense from first principles" and may be a result of repackaging after its early Transformer ASIC faced power consumption issues.

Etched has not yet disclosed complete computing power, power consumption, and third-party benchmark data; the official website only states that "early customer tests have reached leading levels," and detailed performance data will be "released later." There is currently no evidence to prove that Etched is fraudulent. Etched has not publicly responded to this matter.