Nvidia Corp.’s (NASDAQ:NVDA) most famous skeptic just handed the chip giant a new rival to worry about.
Michael Burry declared on Tuesday that “This is serious competition for NVDA,” pointing to a Wall Street Journal report on Etched — a startup that has spent the past two years quietly stocking its engineering ranks with Nvidia’s own talent.
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This is serious competition for NVDA.
— Cassandra Unchained (@michaeljburry) August 18, 2026
The startup says it took just 44 days after getting its test chips back from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing to have them up and running inference workloads—the computing processes that allow AI models to respond to user queries—a…
According to the report, Etched said it took just 44 days after getting test chips back from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing to have them running inference workloads. The process typically takes six months or longer, the report said.
Central to that speed is Brian Loiler, who spent 22 years at Nvidia building its HGX and DGX server systems before Etched recruited him in 2024 as VP of Platform, according to the company.
Since joining, Loiler has helped pull roughly a dozen more engineers away from Nvidia — some of whom turned down richer counteroffers to stay, the Journal reported. Nvidia alumni now make up about 15% of Etched’s roughly 400-person workforce, per the report.
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A Chip Built for One Job
Etched’s flagship product, a chip called Sohu, is designed exclusively to run transformer-based AI models — the architecture behind large language models like ChatGPT — rather than functioning as a general-purpose GPU the way Nvidia’s chips do, CNBC reported when the company first emerged.
The startup raised a $120 million Series A in 2024 with backing from Peter Thiel and Replit CEO Amjad Masad, Reuters reported at the time. Etched closed a $300 million Series C in July that pushed its valuation to $10.3 billion, led by Sequoia with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Jane Street, Diffusion and SK Hynix (NASDAQ:SKHY).
The Bottom Line
Burry’s been hammering the same point for months: Nvidia’s grip on AI chips isn’t as unshakable as Wall Street thinks. Etched just gave him a fresh talking point — a two-year-old startup that built its bench almost entirely out of Nvidia’s own engineers.
NVDA Stock Price Activity: Nvidia stock was down 2.24% at $219.97 at the time of publication Tuesday, according to Benzinga Pro.
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Image created using artificial intelligence via MidJourney.
