Tenstorrent Lands $1.5B to Scale Open AI Chips

Tenstorrent, a 10-year-old hardware company focused on AI inference, has raised $1.5 billion in a fresh financing round that values the business at $6.2 billion. The deal more than doubles the startup's $2.6 billion valuation recorded in late 2024. The new investment was co-led by Trace Capital—a new venture firm started by Quiet Capital co-founder Ben Mahdavi—and Innovation X. A broad group of institutional and corporate backers also joined the round, including Cadence Ventures, Eclipse, Fidelity, SanDisk, and T. Rowe Price.

The massive cash injection comes roughly five months after major chipmakers Intel and Qualcomm expressed interest in acquiring Tenstorrent at valuations reaching up to $5 billion. Instead of selling, chief executive officer Jim Keller—a prominent microprocessor engineer—decided to maintain independence and pursue further growth. That decision was prompted by internal performance results showing that Tenstorrent's Galaxy servers could effectively run open-weight DeepSeek models.

Tenstorrent plans to use the $1.5 billion capital infusion to scale hardware specifically tailored for serving open-weight AI models and processing video generation tasks. For machine learning engineers and infrastructure teams, the availability of specialized inference systems provides a practical alternative to Nvidia’s dominant GPUs. If specialized platforms like Galaxy servers can execute large open models with competitive performance and lower energy overhead, practitioners gain leverage when building scalable AI infrastructure.

The round underscores intense investor interest in alternative AI processor manufacturers attempting to break Nvidia’s near-monopoly. Tenstorrent is not alone in receiving substantial market attention; competing chip startup Etched recently fielded investment offers at valuations of $40 billion or more. Tenstorrent’s latest funding positions it to accelerate silicon production and expand its footprint across enterprise data centers.