Tenstorrent, the AI chip company led by Jim Keller, closed a $1.5 billion Series E funding round at a $6.2 billion post-money valuation. Trace Capital and Innovation X led the round, and the company said it will use the money to deploy its Galaxy servers at scale and develop its licensed AI and CPU designs.
How much did Tenstorrent raise?
Tenstorrent, the artificial intelligence chip company run by Jim Keller, has closed a $1.5 billion Series E funding round at a $6.2 billion post-money valuation, the company announced Monday. Trace Capital and Innovation X led the round.
New and existing investors also took part. They include Agostinelli Group, ARK Invest, Cadence Ventures, Eclipse, Fidelity, Maverick Silicon, Morgan Stanley, Protagonist, Sandisk, T. Rowe Price, Tether Investments, Virtu Financial and XTX Markets.
The new valuation is more than double the $2.6 billion Tenstorrent was worth after its previous round in 2024, Bloomberg reported.
Galaxy servers at scale
What will Tenstorrent use the funding for?
Tenstorrent said it will use the money to deploy its Galaxy servers at scale. The servers run open-weight models, from large language models to video generation. The company will also develop the AI and CPU designs it licenses to companies that build their own chips, including Samsung and LG.
Tenstorrent sells products ranging from a single card or workstation to racks, superclusters and custom designs. Its processors use RISC-V, an open chip architecture, and the company publishes its software stack as open source.
"We built one architecture and sell it at every size," Keller said. "The future of compute is open, scalable, and owned by the people building on it."
Raising instead of selling
Why did Tenstorrent raise money instead of selling?
Earlier this year, Tenstorrent held talks with companies including Intel and Qualcomm about a possible takeover, Bloomberg reported in May. Keller told Bloomberg the company chose to raise money instead of selling.
He said a demonstration in May was a turning point. In it, Galaxy servers ran high-performance models from DeepSeek. Keller also said Tenstorrent can compete on price and take orders that may be too small for bigger rivals.
Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom are the main makers of AI chips, and a number of AI chip startups are trying to challenge them. Tenstorrent is one of those newcomers pitching a model that spans everything from small orders to large data center deployments.
Tenstorrent has 1,150 employees, according to Bloomberg. It operates offices in Santa Clara, Austin, Toronto, Belgrade, Tokyo and Bangalore. The company describes Keller as the architect of Apple's A4 and A5, AMD's Zen and Tesla's Full Self-Driving chip.
Este artículo fue escrito con la asistencia de IA.
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