AI Chip Startup Tenstorrent Raises $1.5 Billion Series E at $6.2 Billion Valuation

Tenstorrent, an AI chip startup led by veteran semiconductor designer Jim Keller, announced on October 19 that it has raised $1.5 billion in a Series E funding round. The round values the company at $6.2 billion, according to Reuters and the trade publication DataCenterDynamics, roughly double the valuation it carried after its previous funding round.

The round was led by Trace Capital and Innovation X, with participation from a mix of asset managers and other backers including Fidelity, ARK Invest, Morgan Stanley, T. Rowe Price and SanDisk, DataCenterDynamics reported.

Tenstorrent said the new capital will go toward scaling production of its Galaxy servers, which combine many of its AI chips into systems aimed at workloads such as chatbots, coding assistants and video generation. The company also plans to grow its workforce and expand the licensing of its chip and CPU designs to other hardware makers.

The company's previous outside round was a Series D of roughly $693 million in December 2024. Reports on that round's resulting valuation vary somewhat between outlets, but they generally place the new $6.2 billion figure at close to double what Tenstorrent was worth at that time.

The new round comes after a period in which Tenstorrent reportedly drew acquisition interest from both Intel and Qualcomm earlier this year, according to TechCrunch. Keller has said the company chose to raise fresh capital and remain independent rather than sell.

Tenstorrent builds AI accelerator chips based on the open RISC-V instruction set, positioning itself as an alternative to Nvidia's dominant AI chip lineup. The fresh funding adds Tenstorrent to a wave of AI chip startups that have raised large rounds this year as demand for AI computing capacity continues to outpace the supply many cloud providers can offer.