AI chip startup Etched defies skeptics, hits $10.3B valuation from big-name investors

“We had no idea how hard it was going to be,” Wachen says. “I think we still have to be humbled by what it will take to actually get to scale.” 

Wachen remembers landing in the Bay Area after telling his parents he was leaving school to do a startup, with no office or apartment arranged. He slept on the floor of a friend’s unfurnished house. 

“I remember staying in my friend’s house that they were about to sell, using a towel as a blanket,” he laughs. The founders eventually set up the servers they needed to run the chip-design tools in the garage of an early employee and “every time it needed to be rebooted, he would call his wife, and she would go and hit the reboot button.” 

Today, there are 400 people bustling in an office, and Etched operates a 2 megawatt data center there. And it just opened a new 80,000 square-foot, 10MW facility in Milpitas, down the road from its main San Jose office.

“We’re running tokens in our lab today, working with some of the largest AI companies in the world,” he says. 

Wachen also has a blanket now, and a mattress “and a pillow even. Multiple pillows,” he jokes.  

More importantly, he and his co-founders never let the doubters stop them. “It’s come a long way. It’s a very, very different world. But I think, when you really think something’s possible, and you just work at it for a long time, you can do it.”

Note: This story was updated to include a reference to the new 10MW facility.