Tenstorrent, the AI chip company run by Jim Keller, has closed a $1.5bn Series E round at a $6.2bn post-money valuation, it announced on Monday. Trace Capital and Innovation X led the round.
New and existing investors also took part. They include Agostinelli Group, ARK Invest, Cadence Ventures, Eclipse, Fidelity, Maverick Silicon, Morgan Stanley, Protagonist, Sandisk, T. Rowe Price, Tether Investments, Virtu Financial and XTX Markets.
The new valuation is more than double the $2.6bn Tenstorrent was worth after its previous round in 2024, Bloomberg reported.
Tenstorrent said it will use the money to deploy its Galaxy servers at scale. They run open-weight models, from large language models to video generation. It will also develop the AI and CPU designs it licenses to companies that build their own chips, including Samsung and LG.
The company sells everything from a single card or workstation to racks, superclusters and custom designs. Its processors use RISC-V, an open chip architecture. It also publishes its software stack as open source.
“We built one architecture and sell it at every size. The future of compute is open, scalable, and owned by the people building on it.” Jim Keller, CEO of Tenstorrent
Raising instead of selling
Earlier this year, Tenstorrent held talks with companies including Intel and Qualcomm about a possible takeover, Bloomberg reported in May. Keller told Bloomberg the company chose to raise money instead of selling.
He said a demonstration in May, in which Galaxy servers ran high-performance models from DeepSeek, was a turning point. He also said Tenstorrent can compete on price and take orders that may be too small for bigger rivals. Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom are the main makers of AI chips, and a number of AI chip startups are trying to challenge them.
Tenstorrent has 1,150 employees, according to Bloomberg, and offices in Santa Clara, Austin, Toronto, Belgrade, Tokyo and Bangalore. The company describes Keller as the architect of Apple’s A4 and A5, AMD’s Zen and Tesla’s Full Self-Driving chip.