Tenstorrent more than doubles to $6.2bn

Tenstorrent, the AI chip company led by chief executive Jim Keller, has raised $1.5bn in a Series E round at a post-money valuation of $6.2bn, the company said in an announcement on Monday. Trace Capital and Innovation X led the round. Tenstorrent designs AI processors and CPUs built on RISC-V, an open instruction set, and licenses some of those designs to other chipmakers.

The announcement lists other participants, new and existing: Agostinelli Group, ARK Invest, Brett Barna, Cadence Ventures, Eclipse, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Maverick Silicon, Morgan Stanley, Protagonist, Sandisk, T. Rowe Price, Tether Investments, Troluce Capital, Virtu Financial and XTX Markets. It does not say how much each put in. The page marks T. Rowe Price with an asterisk that it does not explain.

Tenstorrent said the money will go on volume manufacturing and global commercial expansion, on deploying its Galaxy servers at scale, on serving open-weight models for language and video generation, and on the processor and AI designs it licenses to companies building their own silicon. The company says it licenses its TT-Ascalon RISC-V CPU and Tensix AI cores to chip designers including Samsung and LG, which are also among its backers.

"We built one architecture and sell it at every size," Keller said in the announcement. Ben Mahdavi, founder of Trace Capital, said Keller and his team "bring decades of hands-on silicon, software, and IP experience". George Bousis, co-founder and managing partner of Protagonist, said: "Few companies design the chip and the software that runs on it. Tenstorrent does both."

The step up is large. When Tenstorrent last raised money, in December 2024, it said it had closed more than $693m in a Series D led by Samsung Securities and AFW Partners at a pre-money valuation of $2bn; BetaKit put the post-money figure at $2.6bn. On that basis the new valuation is about 2.4 times the last one, by our arithmetic, in a little under two years.

There has also been talk of a sale. In June, The Information reported that Qualcomm was in talks to buy Tenstorrent for $8bn to $10bn, Reuters reported at the time; both companies declined to comment, and Reuters said it could not verify the report. No deal has been announced, and Monday's announcement does not mention Qualcomm.

Tenstorrent did not disclose revenue, shipments or customer numbers, so the valuation rests on the investors' view of its designs and its licensing business rather than on published results. The round adds a well-funded alternative supplier as AI developers spread their spending across chipmakers. Komposite reported this month on Nvidia's talks over Reflection AI, a lab it already funds, and on Modal's $15.75bn round for AI infrastructure.