Jul 23 - $300M Series C - Sequoia + a16z + SK Hynix - $10.3B val (2x from Dec) - $1B+ customer orders - TSMC manufactured
The decision · If your organization's inference spend exceeds $200,000 per month, request an Etched benchmark on your own workloads within 90 days. Prefill and decode are different economics. If Etched's low-voltage approach lowers inference cost by even 20 percent on your specific models, the savings compound monthly. Do not wait for public benchmarks. Run your own.
Jul 22 - $5B investment + multi-billion chip deal - Instinct MI450 / 2GW capacity - Anthropic IPO target $965B - deployment H1 2027
The decision · Re-baseline your AI infrastructure roadmap within 60 days. If your organization is planning GPU procurement for 2027 and beyond, AMD's entry into enterprise AI training changes the pricing equation. The Nvidia premium was built on a single-source assumption. That assumption is now under negotiation. Start pricing dual-vendor architectures. The MI450 does not need to beat Blackwell on every metric. It only needs to be good enough at a price that makes training GPUs a commodity.
Jul 8 - $2.5B unit - 6,000 staff - pilot to prod
The decision · Deployment, not models, is the moat. If you sell an AI product, your risk is that the customer's hyperscaler wraps your workflow into a 'let us help you implement it' bundle. Decide what you own beyond the model call.