Tenstorrent raises $1.5 billion at a $6.2 billion valuation to scale its AI chips

AI chip company Tenstorrent said on October 19, 2026 that it had closed a $1.5 billion Series E round at a $6.2 billion post-money valuation. The round was led by Trace Capital, a new firm from Quiet Capital co-founder Ben Mahdavi, and Innovation X, with backers including ARK Invest, Fidelity, Morgan Stanley, SanDisk, T. Rowe Price and Tether Investments.

The company, led by veteran chip designer Jim Keller, builds RISC-V-based processors and systems and sells them at every size, from a single card up to full racks and superclusters, alongside licensing its CPU and AI cores to other chipmakers such as Samsung and LG. It plans to use the money to deploy its Galaxy servers at scale, keep serving open-weight language and video models, and advance the chip designs it licenses out.

TechCrunch reported that the raise more than doubled Tenstorrent's valuation from the $2.6 billion it reached in late 2024 and came about five months after reported takeover interest from Intel and Qualcomm at up to $5 billion. Keller told Bloomberg the company chose to stay independent after showing its Galaxy servers could run DeepSeek models. Tenstorrent positions itself as part of a wave of startups trying to loosen NVIDIA's grip on AI hardware.

Why it matters

Big money is flowing into NVIDIA challengers, and a well-funded Tenstorrent betting on open hardware and open-weight models gives buyers another serious option for AI compute.

Source: Tenstorrent