Christopher Zhu

The Thiel Foundation’s list of fellows published in 2024 gives his hometown as Boston, MassachusettsMassachusettsMassachusetts (officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States; its capital and largest city is Boston. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on February 6, 1788, the sixth state to do so. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 7,029,917.Open the full entry. He attended The Roxbury Latin School, whose location the Society for Science list gives as West Roxbury, Massachusetts; a school article of May 2019 calls him a Class II student and one of November 2019 a senior (Class I), the school’s list of 2020 graduates prints his full name as Christopher Grant Zhu, and the school’s articles call him Chris throughout.⁠[1][2][3][4][5]

The Roxbury Latin School wrote in November 2019 that he had begun exploring higher mathematics three years earlier at PROMYS, a summer program at Boston University; the previous summer he continued in the program with an awarded PROMYS Scholarship and the support of the school’s O’Connell Scholarship, and that year he was invited back to PROMYS as a Junior Counselor to mentor new members and teach mini-courses in elliptic curves. The same article as printed in the school’s winter 2020 newsletter calls the school award the O’Connell Fellowship.⁠[4][6]

The MIT PRIMES alumni list includes Christopher Zhu with the years 2018, 2019 and 2020 and HarvardHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry as his college. The Roxbury Latin School wrote in November 2019 that MIT PRIMES is a year-long, research-oriented mathematics and science program for high-school students and that he had done research in it over the previous two years.⁠[7][4]

At the MIT PRIMES Conference of May 18–19, 2019, he gave a talk as a student of The Roxbury Latin School entitled “Enumerating permutations with singleton double descent sets,” with Pakawut Jiradilok as his mentor; the talk concerns counting permutations whose double descent set contains exactly one index.⁠[8]

The MIT PRIMES conference page lists a talk on June 6, 2020, “Homomorphisms of Graphs: Colorings, Cliques and Transitivity,” given by him with Minghan Sun and Andrew Weinfeld as members of a PRIMES reading group, with Younhun Kim as mentor.⁠[9]

The Roxbury Latin School wrote on May 17, 2019 that he had won a bronze medal in the 2019 U.S. Physics Olympiad (USAPhO), as one of four medalists from Massachusetts. In January of that year he and other members of the school’s Science Club took the preliminary F=ma exam on campus; he qualified as a semifinalist and sat the final USAPhO exam on April 2. More than 6,000 high-school students nationwide took part in the preliminary round that year, and he scored in the top 150 nationally.⁠[3]

The article states that he credited Robert Moore’s demanding Honors Physics class, which he took as a sophomore, and the competition opportunities offered by the school’s Science Club; he said, “I enjoyed each science activity during the season.” He also said that in March of that year they traveled to the University of Connecticut for the Northeast Regional High School Science Bowl and that the team finished in the top 10.⁠[3]

His paper “Enumerating Permutations and Rim Hooks Characterized by Double Descent Sets,” signed Christopher Zhu with The Roxbury Latin School as affiliation, was posted on arXiv under the number 1910.12818. It studies dd(I;n), the number of permutations of [n] whose double descent set is I: for singleton sets I it gives a recursive formula and a method of estimation, it counts certain classes of rim hooks, and it closes with conjectures on asymptotic ratios of dd(I;n).⁠[10]

The acknowledgements thank Pakawut Jiradilok of MIT for guidance on the research, Yongyi Chen and Tanya Khovanova of MIT for proofreading the paper, and Pavel Etingof, Slava Gerovitch and Tanya Khovanova for providing the research opportunity through the MIT PRIMES program, with particular thanks to Tanya Khovanova for her suggestions about double descents; the paper states that the work was supported by National Science Foundation Grant No. 1916120.⁠[10]

The Roxbury Latin School wrote that in October 2019 he published his MIT PRIMES research on arXiv and that the work would appear in a publication by The International Press of Boston. The school’s article of January 2020 states that the research was inspired by a 2017 joint paper by five American researchers on recursions and algebraic properties of descent polynomials; he extended that work to a new pattern of descents, proposed a recursion and developed several new theorems by classifying number sequences as geometric diagrams.⁠[4][11]

The Roxbury Latin School wrote on November 11, 2019 that he had been chosen as a semifinalist on the strength of his research paper and, at the USA Regional Competition held at the Harvard Science Center on November 2, presented his work before six mathematics professors from Harvard and Brandeis; on November 3 he was named a finalist in the USA Region of the 2019 Global S.-T. Yau High School Science Award for his mathematical research in enumerative combinatorics, as one of three finalists in the mathematics division, and was invited to the Global Final at Tsinghua University in China. The article states that the award was founded in 2008 by Shing-Tung Yau, a Fields Medal laureate and professor of mathematics at Harvard.⁠[4]

The school’s article of January 2020 states that he won “a top prize” at the Global Final of the S.T. Yau High School Science Awards, held at Tsinghua University in Beijing. The MIT PRIMES record of honors lists him as “2019 Yau Science Award USA finalist (Bronze in Math) and Global Math Award winner,” with Pakawut Jiradilok as mentor.⁠[11][12]

On January 8, 2020, the Society for Science & the Public announced the 300 scholars of the Regeneron Science Talent Search 2020, chosen from 1,993 applications from 659 high schools, with $2,000 awarded to each scholar and to each scholar’s school. The entry for Christopher Zhu in the list gives his age as 17 and his school as The Roxbury Latin School, with his paper on double descent sets as the project. The Roxbury Latin School wrote on January 31, 2020 that he and his classmate Andrew Zhang had both been named among the top 300 scholars of this 79th competition and that both had developed their research at MIT PRIMES; the MIT PRIMES record of honors likewise lists him as “2020 Regeneron STS scholar.”⁠[13][2][11][12]

The school’s newsletter of fall 2019 states that he was one of the seven semifinalists from its Class of 2020 in the 65th annual National Merit Scholarship competition. The summer 2020 newsletter states that the process began in October 2018, when more than 1.5 million high-school juniors took the PSAT/NMSQT; all seven of the school’s semifinalists became finalists, and in spring 2020 he, Avi Attar, David LaFond and Ian Richardson won National Merit Scholarships of $2,500 each toward college, among 2,500 winners nationwide chosen from about 15,000 finalists; the school’s graduating class numbered 52.⁠[14][5]

On April 23, 2020, The Roxbury Latin School inducted eleven seniors into the Cum Laude Society in a virtual Hall, Christopher Grant Zhu among them; Headmaster Brennan gave the address and Josh Cervas, president of the school’s Cum Laude chapter, gave the history of the society.⁠[15]

The summer 2020 newsletter states that in spring 2020 he was named the first-prize recipient in the high-school division of the American Prize for a piano solo submission; it describes the American Prize as a nonprofit performing-arts competition founded in 2009, judged on submitted recordings and administered by Hat City Music Theater, Inc., of Danbury, ConnecticutConnecticutConnecticut is a U.S. state in the New England region. Its capital is Hartford and its largest city is Bridgeport (2010 census). It entered the Union on January 9, 1788, as the 5th state, and had a population of 3,605,944 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry.⁠[5]

After secondary school he went to Harvard University; The Harvard Crimson, in an article of March 2024, gives him as a member of its Class of 2024 (’24). The team section of Etched’s website describes him as a “Math 55 alumnus” and a “Math and high performance computing researcher” and states, “Published novel combinatorics work.” VnExpress International wrote in September 2026 that he and Gavin UbertiGavin UbertiGavin Uberti is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Etched, a company that develops specialized inference chips and cluster systems for running large AI models, starting with Sohu, a chip designed only for transformer models; he is a member of the 2024 class of the Thiel Fellowship.Open the full entry met at Harvard in Math 55, which it calls a notoriously difficult undergraduate course in theoretical mathematics.⁠[7][16][17][18]

The newsletter Why You Should Join, in its article on Etched of February 5, 2024, writes that he had been a mathematics and high-performance-computing researcher at Harvard University, that before that he was a software engineering intern at Amazon Web ServicesAmazon Web ServicesAmazon Web Services (AWS) is the cloud computing business of Amazon. Launched in July 2002, it made its public debut with the Amazon S3 storage service on March 14, 2006, and has since added hundreds of services, including Amazon EC2; its segment net sales were about $46.0 billion in the third quarter of 2026.Open the full entry (AWS) and, earlier, a software engineering intern at AvantStay; the article states that he dropped out of Harvard while pursuing a bachelor’s degree in computer science and mathematics.⁠[19]

CNBCCNBCCNBC is an American business and financial news cable channel launched by NBC in 1989; it merged with its rival FNN in 1991 and since January 2026 has been part of Versant Media Group, spun off from Comcast.Open the full entry wrote in June 2024 that Gavin Uberti and he started to work on a chip company after Gavin Uberti did a summer internship working on compilers, and that the pair dropped out of Harvard in 2022 and added Gavin Uberti’s college roommate, Robert WachenRobert WachenRobert Wachen (also Rob Wachen) is the co-founder and president of Etched, a company that builds AI inference chips and cluster systems, and a member of the 2024 class of the Thiel Fellowship.Open the full entry. EE Times, in its June 2023 account of the company’s origins, quotes Gavin Uberti: “it made me think with Chris [Zhu, Etched.ai CTO] that we have to be able to do this better”; the article states that the two decided to start a chip company to design a more efficient inference architecture for large language models.⁠[20][21]

TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry wrote in June 2024 that EtchedEtchedEtched develops AI inference chips and rack systems, co-designing silicon, memory, interconnects, software and manufacturing for large-model inference.Open the full entry, then only two years old, was founded by a pair of Harvard dropouts, Gavin Uberti and him, who along with Robert Wachen and former Cypress Semiconductor chief technology officer Mark Ross sought to create a chip that could do one thing: run AI models. Why You Should Join wrote in February 2024 that the company was founded by Gavin Uberti and him, two Harvard dropouts. On the timing, TechCrunch and VnExpress International write that the company was founded in 2022, while SiliconANGLE writes that it “launched in 2021.”⁠[22][19][23][18][24]

Sonya HuangSonya HuangSonya Huang is a venture capitalist and a partner on Sequoia Capital’s growth team who has co-authored several Sequoia essays on generative artificial intelligence with Pat Grady.Open the full entry and Abhishek Malani, partners at Sequoia CapitalSequoia CapitalSequoia Capital is a venture capital firm founded by Don Valentine in 1972, investing from the seed stage through the growth stage. Its historical investments include Apple, Cisco, Google, YouTube, Airbnb, and Stripe; in 2021 it introduced the Sequoia Capital Fund structure, which can continue to hold public securities, and in 2023 its regional businesses became independent brands and partnerships.Open the full entry, wrote in July 2026 that back in 2022 Gavin, Chris and Rob “were still in their dorm rooms at Harvard” and that the bet was then “deeply contrarian.” TechCrunch wrote in July 2026 that the three founders dropped out of Harvard to launch Etched without knowing how to raise money or how to hire, and that they eventually set up the servers needed to run the chip-design tools in the garage of an early employee. VnExpress International writes that all three eventually dropped out of Harvard.⁠[25][26][18]

EE Times wrote on June 21, 2023 that a pair of 21-year-old Harvard dropouts had raised $5.36 million in a seed round for their chip startup Etched.ai; the article identifies him as the company’s chief technology officer, and the caption of its photograph, supplied by the company, states that Gavin Uberti (left) and he (right) had dropped out of Harvard to form an AI chip startup focused on large language models.⁠[21]

On whether the company’s chip could be compared with accelerators for recommendation workloads, the article quotes him as saying that any such comparison should take the timescales into account: “the market for running transformers didn’t really exist six months ago,” and “The world has changed very rapidly and that is our opportunity.”⁠[21]

On the attitude of investors he said, “Most investors are skeptical, and rightfully so,” because what they see is a pair of undergraduates trying to tackle the semiconductor industry; he added, “But there is definitely still a non-trivial portion of investors who are impressed and excited by the vision.”⁠[21]

On March 20, 2024, the Thiel Foundation announced its new class of 20 Thiel Fellows; he, Gavin Uberti and Robert Wachen were all selected for the Thiel Fellowship with Etched. The announcement states that each fellow receives $100,000 and access to a network of tech founders, investors, scientists and former fellows, and that fellows commit to working full-time on their projects. His entry in the list states that Etched is building the hardware for superintelligence, starting with transformer-specific AI chips that run models at unprecedented speeds and scale, and continues: “Next-generation AI models are set to become GDP-scale investments, requiring the largest infrastructure buildout in history.” and “Etched is creating a new computing paradigm to make this feasible.”⁠[1]

Primary, an investor in Etched, writes in its post announcing the Series A that the three were among the first teams to receive the Thiel Fellowship collectively; TechCrunch wrote in June 2024, “Uberti, Zhu and Wachen are Thiel Fellowship alums.” The team section of Etched’s website describes him as a “Harvard Thiel Fellow.” The Harvard Crimson, in its article of March 27, 2024, lists him with Gavin Uberti and Robert Wachen among the five Harvard students selected in this class, with Etched.ai as the three’s project.⁠[27][22][17][16]

On June 25, 2024, CNBC covered Etched’s Series A under the headline “Harvard dropouts raise $120 million to take on Nvidia’s AI chips,” with a photo caption presenting Robert Wachen, Gavin Uberti and him as Etched’s co-founders; TechCrunch wrote the same day about the company and its chip that runs only transformer models. Brian Schechter, a partner at Primary, writes in the post announcing the investment that Gavin Uberti is joined by his co-founders, Robert Wachen and him, “both equally remarkable in their own rights.”⁠[20][22][27]

On July 23, 2026, Primary published a post announcing Etched’s Series C, led by Sequoia Capital at a $10.3 billion valuation. TechCrunch wrote the same day that the founders—chief executive Gavin Uberti, Robert Wachen and he—had faced plenty of skeptics, who kept doubting even after the company’s announcement about its first batch of silicon.⁠[28][26]

Sequoia Capital’s founder page presents him under the name Chris Zhu as a co-founder of Etched, which it says builds inference clusters for running the most advanced AI models; the page gives 2026 as the year of the partnership and Sonya Huang and Abhishek Malani as the partners. The article the two partners published the same day opens, “Gavin, Rob, Chris and the Etched team are building frontier clusters for inference.”⁠[29][25]

SiliconANGLE wrote on August 18, 2026 that Etched had raised another $700 million at a $21 billion valuation. VnExpress International wrote on September 1, 2026 that Gavin Uberti, Robert Wachen and he, all 24, had turned the once-struggling Etched into a $21 billion AI chip startup; the article states that the trio founded the company in 2022 and at first struggled to convince investors, being three young founders with little semiconductor experience.⁠[24][18]

The Thiel Foundation’s list, his arXiv paper and the lists of MIT PRIMES and the Society for Science write his name as Christopher Zhu; Etched’s website, Sequoia Capital’s founder page and the articles of CNBC, TechCrunch, EE Times and VnExpress International write Chris Zhu; The Harvard Crimson’s article of March 2024 prints his name as Christoper G. Zhu.⁠[1][10][7][2][17][29][20][22][21][18][16]

EE Times called him Etched.ai’s chief technology officer in June 2023; Why You Should Join gave his title in February 2024 as “Co-Founder, Director of Compilers.” As of November 2026, the team section of Etched’s website lists him as “Co-Founder”; the same page lists Mark Ross as chief technology officer, Gavin Uberti as co-founder and chief executive officer and Robert Wachen as co-founder and president.⁠[21][19][17]

The Roxbury Latin School’s summer 2020 newsletter states that he began studying piano at age five and entered his first competition at eight, and that he has performed at Carnegie Hall and Steinway Hall in New York and at Symphony Hall in Boston. The piano awards it lists are second place in the Bradshaw and Buono International Piano Competition, four first prizes in the Massachusetts Music Teachers Association’s Bay State Contest, two prizes from the Steinway Society of Massachusetts, a first prize in the senior division of a University of Rhode Island competition and second place in the intermediate group of the American Protege competition.⁠[5]

The newsletter states that he is also a violinist, has won the top prize of the Roman Totenberg Young Strings Competition and has played first violin in orchestras of the New England Conservatory Prep School and the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra.⁠[5]

The school’s winter 2020 newsletter records that at the Festival of Men’s Choruses concert held in Rousmaniere Hall on November 8 he was the pianist for the school Glee Club’s performance of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” and that at the Recital Hall of December 5 he played Franz Schubert’s Arpeggione Sonata on piano with Eric Zhu (Class V) on viola.⁠[6]

Etched: Official website: https://www.etched.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[17]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[30]