Robert Wachen (Co-Founder of Etched) at Internapalooza
Rob Wachen co-founded Etched and AI chip startup that has raised over $1 billion, reached a valuation of over $10 billion and ...
Co-Founder and President, Etched
Search every verified Robert Wachen interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Robert Wachen, co-founder and president of AI chip startup Etched, has recently discussed the company’s progress and ambitions at several industry events. At the RAISE Summit in July 2026, he participated in a panel on AI-specific chip design, stating that Etched is vertically integrating its entire inference cluster, including custom chips, boards, networking, and cooling. He described the company’s approach as “production is the product,” noting that Etched built multiple versions of its rack before the silicon arrived to model thermal and system-level performance. Wachen also said the company believes inference will become the largest market in the world and that current hardware designs predate ChatGPT-era demands. In a June 2026 podcast interview, Wachen recounted Etched’s founding story alongside co-founder Gavin Uberti, including raising $800 million and signing over $1 billion in customer contracts. He said the company’s hardware is designed to deliver an order of magnitude more concurrency at a given level of interactivity compared to GPUs, translating to better tokens-per-watt efficiency. At an Internapalooza talk in July 2026, Wachen described his path from dropping out of Harvard to starting Etched, and encouraged attendees to pursue high-impact problems, defining opportunity as the gap between external perceptions of risk and internal understanding. Earlier, in a 2024 presentation, he said Etched’s transformer-specific chip could run over 500,000 tokens per second for large models and claimed one server could replace 160 Nvidia H100s.
Rob Wachen co-founded Etched and AI chip startup that has raised over $1 billion, reached a valuation of over $10 billion and ...
Robert Wachen (Etched), Sara Achour (Unconventional AI) and Walter Goodwin (Fractile) join moderator Antoine Moyroud (Lightspeed) on life after the GPU — chips designed around the AI workload from the ground up. Recorded live on the Grace Hopper Stage at the Carrousel du Louvre, Paris, on July 8, 2026. RAISE Summit is Europe's leading AI gathering, bringing together 9,000+ founders, executives, investors, researchers and policymakers. Learn more: https://www.raisesummit.com Subscribe for every session from RAISE Summit 2026.
Gavin Uberti and Robert Wachen, co-founders of Etched, join us to tell the story of building one of the most ambitious AI chip companies in the world. Three years ago, they were two Harvard dropouts trying to convince skeptics they could build better inference hardware than the largest semiconductor companies on earth. Today, Etched has raised $800M, signed more than $1B in customer contracts, and taped out a working chip designed for the post-ChatGPT era. We discuss why inference may become the largest market in the world, why Etched built an entire rack instead of just a chip, the techni…
AI chips designed for running transformer models Founder: Robert Wachen Founder's LinkedIn: / robertwachen Open roles: ML Engineers, Software Engineers, Hardware Engineers, System Engineers For more info: https://www.etched.com/
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