Tenstorrent, a startup focused on inference chips, has secured $1.5 billion in new financing, bringing its valuation to $6.2 billion. This new round more than doubles the company’s late‑2024 valuation of $2.6 billion.
Lead investors and participants
The financing was led by Trace Capital, a firm launched by Ben Mahdavi, co‑founder of Quiet Capital, and Innovation X. Other participants in the round include Cadence Ventures, Eclipse, Fidelity, SanDisk, and T. Rowe Price.
Choosing independence
Jim Keller, Tenstorrent’s CEO and a prominent microprocessor engineer, told Bloomberg that the company opted to remain independent and raise additional capital after demonstrating that its Galaxy servers could run DeepSeek models. That performance helped justify further investment to scale the business.
Use of funds
The new capital will be used to scale chips and infrastructure specifically designed to serve open‑weight AI models and support video generation workloads.
Market context
Tenstorrent is part of a cohort of AI hardware startups seeking to erode Nvidia’s market dominance. Other firms in the space have attracted significant investor interest: TechCrunch reported earlier this month that AI chip maker Etched was fielding offers at valuations of $40 billion or more.
Earlier acquisition interest
The round follows reports from five months earlier that Intel and Qualcomm had expressed acquisition interest in the ten‑year‑old Tenstorrent, with potential valuations of up to $5 billion.
