Realtime AI News
Tenstorrent raises $1.5B at $6.2B valuation to stay independent and scale open-weight AI chips
Tenstorrent has raised $1.5 billion at a $6.2 billion valuation, more than doubling the $2.6 billion it was worth in late 2024. CEO Jim Keller told Bloomberg the inference chip startup chose to remain independent and raise more capital after its Galaxy servers proved they could run DeepSeek models.
Tenstorrent, the inference-focused AI chip startup, has raised $1.5 billion at a $6.2 billion valuation, TechCrunch reported on October 19. The round more than doubles the $2.6 billion valuation the company fetched in late 2024, and it comes five months after the company reportedly drew acquisition interest from Intel and Qualcomm at valuations of as much as $5 billion.
The round was led by Trace Capital, a new firm launched by Quiet Capital co-founder Ben Mahdavi, and Innovation X. Cadence Ventures, Eclipse, Fidelity, SanDisk and T. Rowe Price also participated.
Jim Keller, the prominent microprocessor engineer who serves as Tenstorrent's CEO, told Bloomberg that the company decided to remain independent and raise more capital after showing that its Galaxy servers could run DeepSeek models. That framing ties the funding directly to demonstrated capability rather than to a roadmap.
The new capital will go toward scaling chips tailored for serving open-weight AI models and video generation. Both workloads put a premium on memory bandwidth, interconnect and cost per token — exactly the ground where dedicated inference silicon is trying to take share from general-purpose GPUs.
Tenstorrent is a ten-year-old challenger to Nvidia, and it is not alone in attracting capital. TechCrunch reported earlier this month that Etched, another AI chip maker, was fielding investment offers at valuations of $40 billion or more.
The deal also says something about the consolidation question hanging over AI hardware startups. The earlier acquisition interest from Intel and Qualcomm did not convert into a sale; instead, investors priced Tenstorrent as an independent supplier with its own balance sheet.
What to watch next is execution. Inference chips are judged less on peak throughput than on software maturity, model coverage and real deployment costs, and the test for this valuation will be whether Tenstorrent can turn a Galaxy-runs-DeepSeek demonstration into volume orders.
Why it matters
The round shows that specialised silicon for serving open-weight models can still command large cheques outside Nvidia's orbit. If the capital turns into shippable capacity and customer orders, the inference chip market gains a more credible second supplier.
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