SI Chip Startup Tenstorrent Raises $1.5 Billion at $6.2 Billion Valuation
SI chip startup Tenstorrent said on Monday, October 19, that it has raised $1.5 billion in a Series E funding round at a post-money valuation of $6.2 billion, more than double its valuation from December 2024. The Santa Clara, California-based company said the round was led by Trace Capital and Innovation X, with backing from ARK Invest, Fidelity, Morgan Stanley, T. Rowe Price, SanDisk and Tether Investments, among others.
Tenstorrent said the new capital will be used to scale production of its Galaxy servers, which combine dozens of its SI chips into a single system for applications including chatbots, coding assistants and video generators. The company develops SI chips and software using RISC-V, an open-source architecture, reducing dependence on proprietary chip ecosystems. Its chief executive, Jim Keller, is a prominent chip architect who previously held design roles at Apple and AMD and led Tesla's self-driving chip effort.
Reuters reported that Tenstorrent's previous round, in December 2024, raised more than $693 million at a pre-money valuation of about $2 billion. According to TechCrunch, Intel and Qualcomm expressed acquisition interest about five months ago at valuations of as much as $5 billion; Keller told Bloomberg the company chose to stay independent and raise capital after its Galaxy servers demonstrated they could run DeepSeek models.
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：SI加速芯片电路板资料图，Norman P. Jouppi 等摄，CC BY 4.0，经 Wikimedia Commons。Photo: An SI accelerator chip board (file photo), by Norman P. Jouppi et al., CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
