A Tenstorrent, an artificial intelligence chipmaker led by Jim Keller, announced this Monday (19) a round of US$ 1.5 billion, raising its valuation to US$ 6.2 billion. The amount represents more than double the US$ 2.6 billion recorded in December 2024 and will finance the expansion of production of its Galaxy servers.
The Series E round was led by Trace Capital and Innovation X, with participation from investors such as Tether Investments, ARK Invest, Fidelity, Morgan Stanley, Sandisk, and T. Rowe Price. The financing also brings together companies from the semiconductor sector, including Cadence Ventures.
The main destination of the funds will be to expand the manufacturing and deployment of the Galaxy servers, designed to run open-weight AI models, including large language models and video generation systems. The platform combines dozens of processors developed by Tenstorrent itself and has already begun to be distributed commercially in 2026.
The company also intends to expand its intellectual property licensing business. In addition to selling chips, workstations, and complete servers, it supplies processor designs based on the open RISC-V architecture and AI acceleration cores to manufacturers such as Samsung and LG.
Tenstorrent chose to raise funds instead of selling the company
The new round comes a few months after Tenstorrent drew acquisition interest from Intel and Qualcomm. In May, Bloomberg revealed preliminary talks involving the two manufacturers, at a time when the startup was seeking to consolidate its position in the AI infrastructure market.
Jim Keller told Bloomberg that the company decided to remain independent and raise more capital after demonstrating, in May, that its Galaxy servers could run DeepSeek models. The demonstration helped sustain management's confidence in the platform's commercial capability.
The executive advocates a strategy different from the exclusive sale of AI accelerators: offering the same architecture at different scales, from individual cards to large processing installations and custom chip designs.
The financial trajectory has also changed dimension. In the previous round, completed in December 2024, Tenstorrent had raised more than US$ 693 million. Now, with a valuation of US$ 6.2 billion after the new investment, the company seeks to transform its technology into a larger-scale manufacturing and distribution operation, competing in the market dominated by Nvidia and AMD.
