In a massive show of investor confidence, artificial intelligence chip startup Etched announced on Tuesday that its valuation has more than doubled in less than a month to reach $21 billion. The rapid rise reflects a surging global appetite for hardware specifically tailored to execute artificial intelligence applications.

The San Jose, California based enterprise pulled in $700 million during its latest funding round. Quantitative trading powerhouse Jane Street led the financing, which also drew participation from high profile venture capital firms like Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, and Tiger Global.

This latest influx of capital highlights the growing market focus on inference, which is the operational phase where trained artificial intelligence models process requests and generate outputs. Etched builds specialized AI inference systems designed to make models faster and cheaper to run, as it steps up to challenge Nvidia in the hardware sector.

Speaking on the shifting dynamic, Kleiner Perkins Managing Partner Mamoon Hamid noted that “Inference is becoming one of the most important infrastructure markets in AI, and the winners will be measured by tokens per dollar and per watt.”

The sudden jump to a $21 billion price tag comes shortly after a Series C funding round in July, when the startup was valued at $10.3 billion. Today, the business employs more than 400 workers and already has a working chip in production.

Industry analysts remain cautious about the long term outlook despite the huge numbers involved. Michael Ashley Schulman, partner at Cerity Partners, pointed out that “Etched has impressive technology and serious customer interest, but semiconductor history is littered with brilliant chips that never became great businesses.”

Schulman added that “The market is fighting to estimate the size of the opportunity, the scarcity of a proven alternative to Nvidia, and a billion dollars in customer contracts (but with barely any trailing financials to evaluate).”

Jane Street is acting as both a major backer and a primary customer for the hardware startup. The trading firm received its first equipment rack last month and has already begun integrating the technology into its daily operations.

Beyond its work with Jane Street, Etched revealed that it has accumulated over $1 billion in customer contracts spanning cloud service providers along with various public and private technology companies.