Tenstorrent hits $6.2B valuation to scale open-weight AI chips
AI chip startup Tenstorrent has raised $1.5 billion at a $6.2 billion valuation to scale its hardware for open-weight AI models. The company, led by Jim Keller, aims to compete with Nvidia by focusing on inference and video generation capabilities.
Why it matters
As demand for AI compute grows, Tenstorrent's massive valuation underscores the intense investor interest in alternatives to Nvidia's dominant hardware ecosystem.
Tenstorrent, a chip startup focused on inference, has raised $1.5 billion at a $6.2 billion valuation. The round comes five months after the 10-year-old Nvidia challenger reportedly received acquisition interest from Intel and Qualcomm at valuations of as much as $5 billion.
The fresh round, which more than doubled Tenstorrent’s valuation from the $2.6 billion it fetched in late 2024, was led by Trace Capital, a new firm launched by Quiet Capital co-founder Ben Mahdavi, and Innovation X. Other backers included Cadence Ventures, Eclipse, Fidelity, SanDisk, and T. Rowe Price.
Jim Keller, a prominent microprocessor engineer and Tenstorrent CEO, told Bloomberg that the company decided to remain independent and raise more capital after it showed that its Galaxy servers could run DeepSeek models. The new capital will go toward scaling chips tailored for serving open-weight AI models and video generation.
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