Tenstorrent has raised $1.5 billion at a $6.2 billion valuation. The 10-year-old chip startup focuses on AI inference and is seeking to compete with Nvidia.
The valuation is more than double the $2.6 billion Tenstorrent reached in late 2024. Five months before this round, the company reportedly drew acquisition interest from Intel and Qualcomm at valuations of up to $5 billion.
Trace Capital and Innovation X led the round. Trace Capital is a new firm launched by Ben Mahdavi, a co-founder of Quiet Capital. Cadence Ventures, Eclipse, Fidelity, SanDisk and T. Rowe Price also invested.
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Tenstorrent CEO Jim Keller, a prominent microprocessor engineer, told Bloomberg the company chose to remain independent and raise more money after demonstrating that its Galaxy servers could run DeepSeek models.
Tenstorrent is among the AI hardware startups trying to challenge Nvidia’s dominance. Another, Etched, was fielding investment offers at valuations of $40 billion or more, TechCrunch reported earlier this month.
The capital will scale open-weight AI chips
Tenstorrent plans to use the new capital to scale chips tailored for serving open-weight AI models and video generation.
