Tenstorrent, the AI chip company led by Jim Keller, announced on 19 October that it has raised $1.5bn in a Series E round at a post-money valuation of $6.2bn. Trace Capital and Innovation X led the round, joined by investors including Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, Morgan Stanley, ARK Invest and Sandisk.
The company says the money will go on deploying its Galaxy servers at scale, serving open-weight models for text and video generation, developing the AI and CPU designs it licenses to other chipmakers, and moving to volume manufacturing.
That licensing business sets Tenstorrent apart. As well as selling its own hardware, it licenses its TT-Ascalon RISC-V CPU and Tensix AI cores, so other companies can build them into their own chips. Keller’s pitch is one architecture across every product size, built in the open.
A well-funded company that sells both AI servers and chip designs gives cloud providers and chipmakers another option alongside the established suppliers. The announcement does not include customer names or deployment numbers.
Read the announcement: Tenstorrent announces Series E