Tenstorrent has raised $1.5 billion at a $6.2 billion valuation, the chip startup focused on inference announced. The new funding more than doubles the valuation the company reached in late 2024, when it was valued at $2.6 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 as backers.
The raise comes five months after the 10-year-old Nvidia challenger reportedly drew acquisition interest from Intel and Qualcomm at valuations of as much as $5 billion. Tenstorrent chose to stay independent and bring in more capital instead, CEO Jim Keller told Bloomberg, after the company demonstrated that its Galaxy servers could run DeepSeek models.
Tenstorrent plans to direct the new capital toward scaling chips tailored for serving open-weight AI models and video generation. The company is one of a wave of AI hardware startups working to chip away at Nvidia's dominance in the market.
Among those competitors is Etched, an AI chip maker that was fielding investment offers at valuations of $40 billion or more, TechCrunch reported earlier this month. Tenstorrent's latest round places it among the more highly valued private challengers in the AI chip space as investors continue to back alternatives to Nvidia's hardware.
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