Tenstorrent secures $1.5 billion to expand open-weight AI chip development

Tenstorrent, an AI chip startup specializing in inference, has raised $1.5 billion at a $6.2 billion valuation, more than doubling its valuation from $2.6 billion in late 2024. The funding round, led by Trace Capital and Innovation X, also included investments from Cadence Ventures, Eclipse, Fidelity, SanDisk, and T. Rowe Price. Jim Keller, Tenstorrent’s CEO, told Bloomberg that the company chose to remain independent after demonstrating its Galaxy servers’ ability to run DeepSeek models. The new capital will be used to scale chips designed for open-weight AI models and video generation. The funding comes five months after Tenstorrent reportedly attracted acquisition interest from Intel and Qualcomm at valuations up to $5 billion. Tenstorrent is part of a growing group of AI hardware startups challenging Nvidia’s market dominance, including Etched, which recently received investment offers at valuations exceeding $40 billion.