Tenstorrent Raises $1.5B at $6.2B Valuation to Scale Open-Weight AI Chips
Tenstorrent raised $1.5B at a $6.2B valuation to scale chips for open-weight AI and video generation.
The round was led by Trace Capital, a new firm launched by Quiet Capital co-founder Ben Mahdavi, and Innovation X. Cadence Ventures, Eclipse, Fidelity, SanDisk, and T. Rowe Price also participated. The $6.2 billion valuation is more than double the $2.6 billion valuation Tenstorrent reached in late 2024.
The financing 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. CEO Jim Keller told Bloomberg that Tenstorrent decided to remain independent and raise more capital after showing that its Galaxy servers could run DeepSeek models. Keller is a prominent microprocessor engineer.
Tenstorrent is part of a wave of AI hardware startups trying to chip away at Nvidia’s dominance. Etched, another AI chip maker, was fielding investment offers at valuations of $40 billion or more, TechCrunch reported earlier this month. Tenstorrent focuses on inference chips, and its Galaxy servers are central to its effort to serve open-weight models.