Nvidia challenger Tenstorrent raises $1.5 billion, more than doubling its valuation
Jim Keller's AI chip startup is now valued at $6.2 billion after a new funding round. Most of the money is earmarked for deploying its Galaxy servers at scale.
Symbolic image · Photo: Derrick Coetzee (User:Dcoetzee) / Wikimedia Commons, CC0 (cropped and resized)
U.S. chip designer Tenstorrent has raised $1.5 billion in a Series E round, giving the Santa Clara, California-based company a post-money valuation of $6.2 billion, it said on Monday. That is more than double its valuation from December 2024, when it raised over $693 million at a $2 billion pre-money valuation.
The round was led by Trace Capital and Innovation X, with participation from Cathie Wood's ARK Invest, memory maker Sandisk, Morgan Stanley, T. Rowe Price, Fidelity and Tether Investments, among others. The funds will go toward scaling up Galaxy servers, which combine dozens of Tenstorrent's AI chips to run open-weight language and video models, and toward CPU and AI cores it licenses to chip designers such as Samsung and LG.
Tenstorrent builds on the open RISC-V chip architecture and is seen as one of Nvidia's challengers. It is led by veteran chip architect Jim Keller, who previously held key design roles at Apple, AMD and Tesla. “We built one architecture and sell it at every size,” Keller said, a range that runs from single cards to data-center superclusters.