Tenstorrent hits $6.2B valuation to scale open-weight AI chips
Tenstorrent raised $1.5 billion at a $6.2 billion valuation to scale its open-weight AI inference chips and challenge Nvidia.Summary
Tenstorrent, a 10-year-old chip startup focused on AI inference, has raised $1.5 billion at a $6.2 billion valuation, more than doubling its previous valuation of $2.6 billion from late 2024. The round, led by Trace Capital and Innovation X with additional backing from Cadence Ventures, Eclipse, Fidelity, SanDisk, and T. Rowe Price, comes five months after reports of acquisition interest from Intel and Qualcomm at valuations up to $5 billion. CEO Jim Keller stated that the company chose to remain independent after demonstrating that its Galaxy servers could run DeepSeek models. The fresh capital will be used to scale chips tailored for open-weight AI models and video generation. Tenstorrent is part of a broader wave of AI hardware startups, including Etched, seeking to challenge Nvidia's dominance in the AI chip market.
(Source：TechCrunch)