The AI chip race has another heavyweight balance sheet. Tenstorrent, the inference-focused chip startup led by legendary processor engineer Jim Keller, has raised $1.5 billion at a $6.2 billion valuation — more than double its $2.6 billion valuation from late 2024.
The round was led by Trace Capital, the new firm launched by Quiet Capital co-founder Ben Mahdavi, and Innovation X, with backing from Cadence Ventures, Eclipse, Fidelity, SanDisk and T. Rowe Price. The new capital is earmarked for scaling chips tailored to serving open-weight AI models and video generation.
The raise was a deliberate choice of independence. Keller told Bloomberg the company chose to stay independent and raise after reportedly receiving acquisition interest from Intel and Qualcomm at valuations of up to $5 billion five months ago — a decision that followed a demonstration of Tenstorrent's Galaxy servers running DeepSeek models.
Tenstorrent, now ten years old, sits in a wave of AI hardware startups challenging Nvidia's dominance of the accelerator market, alongside names like Etched. Its pitch is architectural openness: RISC-V-based designs aimed at customers who want to run open models without a single vendor's stack.
With $1.5 billion of fresh capital and a valuation the public-market suitors would not match, the bet is now explicit — that the market for serving open-weight models is big enough to sustain an independent challenger.
