Tenstorrent, the AI chip company led by Jim Keller, has closed a $1.5 billion Series E round at a $6.2 billion post-money valuation. Trace Capital and Innovation X led the round, with participation from investors including ARK Invest, Fidelity, Morgan Stanley, T. Rowe Price, Sandisk and Tether Investments. The money will fund large-scale deployment of its Galaxy servers and further work on the RISC-V and AI cores it licenses to chip designers such as Samsung and LG.

What it means: The market for AI processors is dominated by Nvidia, but Tenstorrent's round shows investors are still willing to pay for alternatives. The company does not only sell cards and servers; it also licenses its cores so that other manufacturers can build their own silicon on the open RISC-V architecture. That model suits countries and companies that want to control their compute infrastructure rather than depend on a single supplier. Tenstorrent's open-source software matters too, because Nvidia's big advantage is not just hardware but the CUDA ecosystem around it. For European businesses, more choice could gradually lower the cost of running models on their own premises, which is useful when data must not leave the company. Tether's participation also shows how far money from the crypto sector has spread into infrastructure investments. The key question is whether Tenstorrent can deliver servers in volume and on time, at a moment when memory supply and manufacturing capacity are under heavy pressure. The funding buys time, but the real test will be customers moving production workloads onto its systems rather than running pilots.

Read the original on Tenstorrent

Related service: Custom software

Related stories