Science & TechChips
Jim Keller's chip start-up Tenstorrent raises $1.5 billion at a $6.2 billion valuation
The Nvidia challenger, which designs chips for running AI models, more than doubled its value since late 2024 and plans to focus on open-weight models and video generation.
Key points
- Tenstorrent raised $1.5 billion, valuing it at $6.2 billion.
- Its valuation has more than doubled from $2.6 billion in late 2024.
- The money will go into chips for open-weight AI models and video generation.
Tenstorrent, the AI chip start-up led by the veteran processor designer Jim Keller, has raised $1.5 billion in a funding round that values it at $6.2 billion, more than double the $2.6 billion it was worth in late 2024.
The round was led by Trace Capital, a new firm set up by Quiet Capital co-founder Ben Mahdavi, and Innovation X. Cadence Ventures, Eclipse, Fidelity, SanDisk and T. Rowe Price also invested.
The 10-year-old company, one of a handful trying to break Nvidia’s hold on AI hardware, focuses on inference, the work of running trained models rather than training them. It says it will use the new money to scale up chips built to serve open-weight AI models, whose underlying parameters are published for anyone to use, as well as video generation.
Keller has said the company’s Galaxy servers can run models from the Chinese developer DeepSeek.
The raise comes about five months after reports that Intel and Qualcomm had shown interest in buying Tenstorrent at valuations of up to $5 billion. Investors are pouring money into Nvidia’s rivals: the chip start-up Etched was reported to be fielding offers that would value it at $40 billion or more.