Tenstorrent raises $1.5B at $6.2B valuation
Original: Tenstorrent hits $6.2B valuation to scale open-weight AI chips
Why This Matters
Open-weight AI chip demand is drawing serious capital as alternatives to Nvidia scale up.
Tenstorrent closed a $1.5B round at a $6.2B valuation, led by Trace Capital and Innovation X, to scale chips for open-weight AI models and video generation, rejecting earlier acquisition interest from Intel and Qualcomm.
Tenstorrent, the 10-year-old inference chip startup backed by CEO Jim Keller, has raised $1.5 billion in a round that more than doubled its late-2024 valuation of $2.6 billion. The round was led by Trace Capital — a new firm from Quiet Capital co-founder Ben Mahdavi — and Innovation X, with participation from Cadence Ventures, Eclipse, Fidelity, SanDisk, and T. Rowe Price.
The raise comes five months after reports that Intel and Qualcomm had floated acquisition offers at up to $5 billion. Keller told Bloomberg the company chose to stay independent after demonstrating that its Galaxy servers could run DeepSeek models — a proof point that apparently convinced investors and killed the acquisition talks.
New capital will fund chips specifically built for serving open-weight AI models and video generation workloads. Tenstorrent sits in a growing field of Nvidia challengers; Etched, another AI chip startup, was reportedly fielding investment interest at valuations of $40 billion or more as of earlier this month.