Tenstorrent, a decade-old AI chip startup focused on inference, has raised $1.5 billion at a $6.2 billion valuation. The round was led by Trace Capital, a new firm launched by Quiet Capital co-founder Ben Mahdavi, and Innovation X. Other backers included Cadence Ventures, Eclipse, Fidelity, SanDisk, and T. Rowe Price.
The valuation is more than double the $2.6 billion Tenstorrent fetched in late 2024. Five months ago, the company reportedly received acquisition interest from Intel and Qualcomm at valuations as high as $5 billion. CEO Jim Keller told Bloomberg that Tenstorrent decided to stay independent and raise capital after demonstrating that its Galaxy servers could run DeepSeek models.
The new funding will go toward scaling chips designed for serving open-weight AI models and video generation. Tenstorrent is among a wave of AI hardware startups trying to take share from Nvidia; the source notes that Etched, another chip maker, has been fielding investment offers at valuations of $40 billion or more.