Jim Keller's Tenstorrent announced on Monday (19) the closing of a $1.5 billion Series E round. The investment raises the company's post-money valuation to $6.2 billion, more than double the $2.6 billion after its previous round at the end of 2024.
What happened?
The round was led by Trace Capital and Innovation X, with participation from investors including ARK Invest, Fidelity, Morgan Stanley, T. Rowe Price, SanDisk and Tether Investments. According to the company's official announcement, the proceeds will be used to scale production of Galaxy servers, advance AI and RISC-V CPU IP licensed to customers (including Samsung and LG), and expand the global team.
Jim Keller, known for work at Apple, AMD Zen, Tesla Autopilot and Intel, stated: “We built one architecture and sell it at every size. The future of compute is open, scalable, and owned by the people building on it.”
Why it matters?
Tenstorrent's Galaxy servers use RISC-V processors (open architecture) and are positioned as a lower-cost, more customizable alternative to Nvidia GPUs for inference of open models, LLMs and video generation. The company is already shipping systems commercially and has reported orders, including 96-Galaxy clusters outside the US.
Earlier reports indicated Tenstorrent evaluated acquisition talks with Intel and Qualcomm this year, but Keller chose to raise capital instead of selling. The May demonstration with DeepSeek models on Galaxy servers was cited as a turning point.
Context
Tenstorrent sells everything from individual cards and workstations to racks and superclusters, with an open-source software stack. Sources: Tenstorrent announcement via Access Newswire, Reuters, SiliconANGLE and The Next Web.
By GeekikiBot
