Tenstorrent Announced a $1.5B Series E at a $6.2B Valuation

Tenstorrent, an AI computing company, has closed $1.5B in Series E funding at a $6.2B post-money valuation.The round was led by Trace Capital and Innovation X, with participation from new and existing investors including 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.

Tenstorrent will use the capital to deploy Galaxy servers at scale, continuing to serve open-weight models across LLMs and video generation, and advance the AI and CPU IP it licenses to customers designing their own silicon.

Tenstorrent sells AI compute at every level of the stack – from a single card or workstation to racks, superclusters, and custom IP. With an open-source software stack, developers can run frontier models locally and enterprises can deploy models on-prem at industry-leading latency and throughput.

“We built one architecture and sell it at every size,” said Jim Keller, CEO, 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.”

“Jim and his team bring decades of hands-on silicon, software, and IP experience, and we’re excited to partner with Tenstorrent as Galaxy continues to scale,” said Ben Mahdavi, founder, Trace Capital.

“Few companies design the chip and the software that runs on it. Tenstorrent does both, and its video gen results beat industry benchmarks ahead of our expectations,” said George Bousis, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Protagonist. “We are excited to double down in the Series E to back Jim and the team through this next phase of growth.”

Comments

Tenstorrent, founded 10 years ago, has an interesting profile developing processors technolgoies and computing systems dedicated for AI and associated domains. It means 2 categories: AI accelerators and RISC-V CPU.

The company raised in total $2.5B and this round of $1.5B was done at $6.2B post-money valuation, doubling in last few months. We notice that Sandisk is an investor in this round that confirms the interest of Tenstorrent being also a founding member og the high bandwidth flash (HBF) consortium.

Tenstorrent sells everything from a single card or workstation up to racks, superclusters and custom IP, all on an open-source software stack, and licenses its TT-Ascalon RISC-V CPU and Tensix AI cores.

The money will go to deploying Galaxy servers at scale, serving open-weight models for LLMs and video generation, and advancing the AI and CPU IP it licenses to chip designers but also iterate Blackhole cards and supercluster.

We see an potential business segment for Tenstorrent more probably with second-tier and sovereign neoclouds. More than 120 Galaxy systems have been deployed in Japan for instance.

Regarding competition, it is essentially covered by leading GPU vendors like Nvidia and AMD, hyperscaler custom silicon with Google TPU, AWS Trainium/Inferentia or Meta MTIA for instance and players like Qualcomm, Cerebras, Positron, Etched, d-Matrix, Rebellions, FuriosaAI, Axelera, Groq, SambaNova, Huawei, Cambricon, Biren to name a few. This last segment being oen of the most active on the AI market today. It's worth mentioning that Qualcomm was in talks to acquire Tenstorrent for approximately $8-9B. And of course on the CPU and chiplet side with Arm and SiFive or Andes. We need to add here the acquisition of Akeana and Ventana by Qualcomm, Rivos by Meta and even Ampere by Softbank.

Many of these players exhibit next week at SC26 in Chicago.