Jack Selby, a longtime Thiel Capital managing director who founded Phoenix-based Copper Sky in 2021, used a promise to help reshore chip fabrication to Arizona to secure an allocation in AI chip startup Etched's Series A -- now valued at $5B with its first.
Jul 2, 2026Jack Selby, a former PayPal executive and longtime managing director at Peter Thiel's family office, has been using his Phoenix-based venture firm Copper Sky Capital — and his seat on the Arizona Commerce Authority board — to secure allocations into hot AI startups like Etched, TechCrunch reported July 2. Copper Sky invested in Etched's $120 million Series A roughly two years ago partly by pledging to help the Nvidia competitor eventually move chip fabrication to Arizona's TSMC GIGAFAB, and is now raising a $300 million second fund built around the same regional-manufacturing thesis.
Jul 2, 2026Etched, the Harvard-dropout-founded chip startup building Sohu, a transformer-only inference chip, disclosed on June 30 that it has booked over $1 billion in orders and closed an unannounced $500 million round in December at a $5 billion post-money valuation. The company bundles Sohu chips with custom racks and software into 'frontier inference clusters' aimed at cheaper, faster, more power-efficient inference than Nvidia GPUs.
Jun 30, 2026Etched, the Harvard-dropout-founded AI chip startup building the transformer-specific Sohu chip, disclosed on June 30 that it has booked more than $1 billion in customer contracts for its 'frontier inference clusters' and sits at a $5 billion valuation following a $500 million round in December. The company says an 8-chip Sohu server can outperform 160 Nvidia H100 GPUs on Llama 70B inference while using less power and space -- a direct challenge to Nvidia's inference dominance from a company that nearly ran out of cash three years ago.
Jun 30, 2026