Chip startup Tenstorrent, which focuses on inference, has successfully raised $1.5 billion at a valuation of $6.2 billion. This significant funding round arrives five months after the 10-year-old Nvidia competitor reportedly received acquisition interest from Intel and Qualcomm, with offers reaching as high as $5 billion.
The new investment more than doubled Tenstorrent’s valuation from the $2.6 billion it secured in late 2024. The round was led by Trace Capital, a new firm established by Quiet Capital co-founder Ben Mahdavi, alongside Innovation X. Additional investors participating in the funding included Cadence Ventures, Eclipse, Fidelity, SanDisk, and T. Rowe Price.
Jim Keller, a renowned microprocessor engineer and Tenstorrent’s CEO, informed Bloomberg that the company chose to remain independent and raise further capital after demonstrating that its Galaxy servers are capable of running DeepSeek models. The capital will be used to scale production of chips specifically designed for serving open-weight AI models and video generation tasks.
Tenstorrent is part of a growing trend of artificial intelligence hardware startups attempting to chip away at Nvidia’s market dominance. Notably, an AI chip manufacturer named Etched was reportedly fielding investment offers with valuations exceeding $40 billion earlier this month, according to TechCrunch.
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