Etched raises $300 million at a $10.3 billion valuation to scale inference hardware production

Xeal launched Laitent, which it calls the world's first edge inference compute network using idle EV charging capacity, tapping more than 200MW of permitted, installed electrical infrastructure across 1,600+ properties. Xeal, a member of NVIDIA Inception, plans to deploy over 100,000 NVIDIA GPUs alongside EV charging infrastructure, and has secured partnerships with Rafay Systems for AI infrastructure orchestration, Spectrum Business for dedicated enterprise-grade fiber, dozens of real estate and property managers, and a Tier 1 inference provider for up to 5MW of compute. The first Laitent Pod will be brought online with partner JVM Realty by the end of 2026. Each Laitent Pod is about the size of one parking space, contains up to 48 NVIDIA Hopper or Blackwell Ultra GPUs, requires no water hookup, and runs quiet at less than 65 decibels, offering sub-20ms latency in metro areas. Xeal said EV charging sites typically operate at less than 10% of permitted capacity, and it taps the remaining 90% for compute, with property owners able to add as much as $1m in property value for little-to-no upfront investment. Looking beyond the initial 200MW of installed charging capacity, Xeal plans to unlock over 1GW of existing headroom across real estate and EV charging deployments.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the company expects chip sales next year to be about twice this year's level, sending shares up more than 2% Thursday. Speaking at an event in Scotland, Huang pointed to continued demand as businesses expand their use of artificial intelligence. Nvidia also released preliminary MLPerf results on Sept. 16 showing its next-generation Vera Rubin NVL72 platform delivering up to 3.7 times the inference throughput of the previous GB300 system on the Qwen3-VL test. Vera Rubin has entered full production, with shipments expected to begin this fall. The broader market added to the lift, as U.S. stocks rebounded Thursday with oil prices falling more than 2% and the 10-year Treasury yield easing, helping technology shares recover from recent pressure.

Qualcomm has given Amazon an equity-linked incentive to deepen their AI-infrastructure partnership, with Amazon able to eventually purchase as much as $60 billion of Qualcomm data-center products while purchase-linked warrants could hand Amazon roughly $4 billion of Qualcomm shares at $161.26 each. Qualcomm shares gained approximately 2.1% to $188.64 Thursday, a level 7.37% above the stock's $175.69 GF Value. The warrant value represents roughly 6.7% of the maximum purchasing framework, directly tying Amazon's buying activity to Qualcomm's equity story. The two companies are also working together on custom AI inference silicon and optical connectivity capable of reaching 1.6 terabits per second. No minimum purchase commitment, delivery timetable or margin profile has been disclosed.