Michael Burry Flags New AI Chip Startup By Harvard Dropouts As ‘Serious Competition’ For Nvidia

Founded in 2022, Etched has emerged as a closely watched AI chip startup after raising $700 million from Jane Street and others at a $21 billion valuation.

• Etched, which positions itself as a challenger to Nvidia, raised huge sums and brought its first set of chips to the market in record time.
• “This is serious competition for NVDA,” Burry wrote on X and posted a story by The Wall Street Journal detailing the startup’s rapid rise.
• Burry is one of the most prominent investors with a negative view on Nvidia.

Michael Burry said Tuesday that chip startup Etched, which raised $2 billion in a matter of months and is reportedly poaching talent from Nvidia, is a threat to AI chipmakers.

“This is serious competition for NVDA,” Burry wrote on X and posted a story by The Wall Street Journal detailing the startup’s rapid rise and a new funding round in the works.

He highlighted sections from the article, notably that Etched claims it took just 44 days after getting its test chips back from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing to run inference workloads, a process that usually takes six months or more.

He also added that Etched reportedly recruited engineer and 23-year Nvidia veteran Brian Loiler in 2024, who then hired about a dozen engineers from the AI chipmaker.

Burry is one of the most prominent investors with a negative view on Nvidia, which sits at the center of the AI chip boom. 

His comments have frequently fueled the narrative that the market is in an “AI bubble,” that chip and other AI-linked stocks are overvalued, and that Nvidia’s circular financing deals are artificially propping up its revenue.

Last week, Burry said Nvidia’s latest partnership with Wall Street banks to funnel  $500 billion to chip buyers was a “sign of desperation.” 

Nvidia stock has declined for three straight sessions, losing 2.5% cumulatively. On Stocktwits, the retail sentiment for NVDA was ‘bearish.’

Is Etched A Threat To Nvidia?

Founded in 2022, Etched has emerged as one of the most closely watched AI chip startups after raising $700 million in a new funding round led by Jane Street that values the company at $21 billion. 

The company has now raised nearly $2 billion in total, despite being founded by three 24-year-old Harvard dropouts and having only recently brought its first chips to market.

Etched’s rise has been unusually fast for a semiconductor startup, a sector known for high costs and long development cycles. 

The company spent tens of millions of dollars on testing equipment, built a 2-megawatt data center in its offices, and took greater control of its supply chain to speed up development, according to the WSJ report. 

Etched is positioning itself as a challenger to Nvidia by focusing its chips specifically on AI inference, the computing process that allows AI models to respond to users. 

Its architecture is designed to let multiple chips communicate and operate more like a single processor, which the company says can significantly reduce communication times compared with Nvidia’s Blackwell chips. 

The startup has also recruited aggressively from Nvidia, with around 15% of its roughly 400 employees having previously worked at the AI chip giant.

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