Key points
- Tenstorrent more than doubles its valuation
- ARK and Sandisk back Tenstorrent's round
- Where Tenstorrent's new money goes
AI chip startup Tenstorrent has raised $1.5 billion in a funding round that values the company at $6.2 billion, more than twice its valuation after its December 2024 round. The new money will help deploy its Galaxy servers and fund further chip development, the company said Monday.
Trace Capital and Innovation X led the Series E round. Participants included ARK Invest, Sandisk (SNDK), Morgan Stanley (MS), Fidelity Management & Research, Virtu Financial (VIRT), and Tether Investments.
How the valuation changed
Tenstorrent raised $693 million in December 2024 at a $2 billion valuation before that investment. Including the new capital, the round valued the company at about $2.7 billion. Its latest $6.2 billion valuation also includes the money raised, making it roughly 2.3 times the earlier figure.
Samsung Securities and AFW Partners led the 2024 round. Earlier backers include Bezos Expeditions, Samsung, LG Electronics, and Hyundai Motor Group.
The financing follows reports that Intel (INTC) and Qualcomm (QCOM) each tried to acquire Tenstorrent for upward of $5 billion earlier this year, according to The Globe and Mail.
Where the money goes
Tenstorrent will use the capital to deploy its Galaxy servers at scale, the company said. The servers run open-weight AI models, including large language models and video generators. Tenstorrent will also keep developing the RISC-V CPU and AI chip designs it licenses to other chipmakers, including Samsung and LG. "We built one architecture and sell it at every size," said Jim Keller, Tenstorrent's chief executive.
RISC-V is an open instruction-set architecture. Companies can use the standard without paying royalties, though commercial chip designs based on it can carry licensing fees. Tenstorrent sells everything from single cards and workstations to full racks, and its software is open source.
"Few companies design the chip and the software that runs on it. Tenstorrent does both, and its video generation results beat industry benchmarks ahead of our expectations," said George Bousis, co-founder and managing partner at Protagonist, which also invested.
Keller's career includes work on Apple's A4 and A5 chips, AMD's Zen architecture, and Tesla's Full Self-Driving chip, according to the company. Tenstorrent was founded in Toronto in 2016 and now operates from Santa Clara, Austin, Toronto, Belgrade, Tokyo, and Bangalore. About 200 of its roughly 1,000 employees work in Toronto.
