AI NewsEtched: The $5B Sohu Chip Betting the Transformer Never Dies
Etched, a startup building the transformer-only Sohu inference ASIC, has booked over $1 billion in contracts and reached a $5 billion valuation, with reports of new rounds valuing it up to $20 billion. Sohu hard-wires the transformer graph into silicon on TSMC N4P with 144GB HBM3E, and Etched claims an 8-chip server exceeds 500,000 Llama 70B tokens/sec. No independent benchmarks exist yet.
By Sarah Chen · 5 min · Jul 25, 2026
