a16z backs Etched’s bet that AI inference will define the next computing era
a16z · x · 2026-07-23
a16z’s Sarah Wang and Raghu Raghuram argue that AI inference may be the most consequential workload of the era, and frame Etched as a company betting on that thesis.
The quoted article traces Etched’s origin story: in 2022, before ChatGPT and before tools like Cursor, Claude Code, or Codex, founders Gavin Uberti, Robert Wachen, and Chris Zhu dropped out of Harvard to build an entire inference stack from scratch — chips, boards, interconnects, and racks.
The piece argues that in a world where production is the product and the machine is the moat, specialized inference infrastructure could become the defining bet.
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