Tenstorrent has closed $1.5 billion in Series E funding at a post-money valuation of $6.2 billion, more than doubling the value investors placed on the AI chip company less than two years ago. The round was led by Trace Capital and Innovation X, the company announced on Monday.
Who backed the round
The round drew a long list of new and existing investors, including ARK Invest, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Morgan Stanley, T. Rowe Price, Sandisk and Tether Investments. Eclipse, Cadence Ventures, Maverick Silicon, Virtu Financial, XTX Markets and the Agostinelli Group also took part.
Where the money goes
Tenstorrent plans to use the capital to deploy its Galaxy servers at scale. Galaxy systems combine dozens of its AI chips and power applications such as chatbots, coding assistants and video generators. The funding will also advance the AI and CPU intellectual property the company licenses to customers designing their own silicon.
One architecture at every size
“We built one architecture and sell it at every size,” said Jim Keller, CEO of Tenstorrent. “The future of compute is open, scalable, and owned by the people building on it. Our investors believe in that model too, and we appreciate their support.”
Tenstorrent sells AI compute at every level of the stack, from a single card or workstation to racks, superclusters and custom IP. Its software stack is open source, so developers can run frontier models locally and enterprises can deploy models on premise with low latency and high throughput.
The open alternative
Tenstorrent builds its processors on RISC-V, an open chip architecture that lets companies design processors without license fees and reduces dependence on proprietary chip ecosystems such as Arm. The company licenses its TT-Ascalon RISC-V CPU and Tensix AI cores to chip designers including Samsung and LG.
“Few companies design the chip and the software that runs on it. Tenstorrent does both,” said George Bousis, co-founder and managing partner at Protagonist, which doubled down in the round.
A sharp jump in value
The $6.2 billion valuation marks a steep step up from the company’s last raise. In December 2024, Tenstorrent raised more than $693 million at a $2 billion pre-money valuation, in a round led by Samsung Securities and AFW Partners.
Keller is one of the most decorated chip architects in the industry, with Apple’s A4 and A5 chips, AMD’s Zen processors and Tesla’s Full Self-Driving chip on his record. Tenstorrent operates from Santa Clara, Austin, Toronto, Belgrade, Tokyo and Bangalore, and its earlier backers include Bezos Expeditions, Samsung, LG Electronics and Hyundai Motor Group. The raise is also a sign of how much capital is now flowing into AI infrastructure startups building the hardware layer of the AI stack.
