Tenstorrent raises $1.5B and reaches a $6.2B valuation

In short: Tenstorrent, a startup that makes computer chips for running AI, raised $1.5 billion at a $6.2 billion valuation.

What happened

Tenstorrent said it raised $1.5 billion in new funding, valuing the company at $6.2 billion. A valuation is an estimate of what investors think the whole company is worth, like pricing a house before someone buys a share of it.

The funding round was led by Trace Capital, a new firm started by Quiet Capital co-founder Ben Mahdavi, and Innovation X. Other investors included Cadence Ventures, Eclipse, Fidelity, SanDisk, and T. Rowe Price.

The company’s CEO, Jim Keller, told Bloomberg that Tenstorrent chose to stay independent after it received takeover interest earlier this year from Intel and Qualcomm. Tenstorrent said it recently showed its Galaxy servers could run DeepSeek AI models, and it plans to use the new money to scale chips built for serving “open-weight” AI models and video generation. Open-weight means the model’s core settings are shared publicly, like a recipe you can download and cook yourself instead of only ordering the dish from a restaurant.

Why it matters

AI services rely on specialized chips to run quickly and at lower cost, especially when they respond to users in real time. Nvidia is the biggest supplier of these chips, and Tenstorrent is one of several companies trying to offer alternatives. More competition can affect prices, availability, and which companies get to build the next wave of AI products.

Source: TechCrunch AI