1. Etched AI, a startup developing specialized AI processor chips, has raised $120 million in a Series B funding round, positioning it as a potential challenger to NVIDIA's dominance in the AI chip market. The company's chips are designed to be more energy-efficient and optimized for transformer-based AI models, which are increasingly used in natural language processing and other AI applications.

2. Etched AI's technology is based on a novel chip architecture that the company claims can outperform NVIDIA's GPUs in terms of energy efficiency and performance for transformer-based models. The startup is targeting the rapidly growing market for AI inference, which is the process of running trained AI models to make predictions or decisions, rather than the training of the models.

3. The funding round was led by Coatue Management, with participation from existing investors including Khosla Ventures, Lux Capital, and Exor N.V. Etched AI plans to use the new funding to accelerate the development and commercialization of its AI processor chips, as well as to expand its team and scale its operations to meet the growing demand for specialized AI hardware.