Michael Burry called AI chip startup Etched strong competition for Nvidia, citing an unnamed semiconductor industry insider who said its product could deliver 10 times the performance at a lower cost per chip. Etched says it brought TSMC-manufactured test chips to AI inference workloads in 44 days, compared with an industry timeline of six months or more. The company has recruited heavily from Nvidia, including former systems engineer Brian Loiler, who worked there for nearly 23 years, and about 12 other Nvidia engineers. Etched announced a funding round valuing it at $21 billion after a $300 million Series C valued it at $10.3 billion, although the later round's size has been reported inconsistently as $700 million and $800 million. Its Sohu chip targets transformer-based inference rather than Nvidia's broader GPU workloads. Etched has more than $1 billion in customer contracts, and Jane Street, the round's lead investor, is also its first customer. Nvidia's CUDA ecosystem, manufacturing reach and full-stack platform remain significant barriers to a scalable challenge.