AI chip startup Tenstorrent has closed a $1.5 billion Series E funding round at a $6.2 billion post-money valuation, one of the largest private semiconductor raises of the year. The round was led by Trace Capital and Innovation X, with participation from new and existing investors including ARK Invest, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Morgan Stanley, T. Rowe Price, Tether Investments, Sandisk, XTX Markets, and others.
The Silicon Valley company, led by CEO Jim Keller — the veteran chip architect behind AMD’s Zen and Tesla’s Autopilot silicon — sells AI compute at every level of the stack: from a single card or workstation to racks, superclusters, and custom IP licensed to customers designing their own silicon. Tenstorrent says it will use the new capital to deploy its Galaxy servers at scale, continue serving open-weight models across LLMs and video generation, and advance the AI and CPU IP it licenses.
The company’s pitch centers on openness. With an open-source software stack, developers can run frontier models locally and enterprises can deploy models on-prem with what the company claims is industry-leading latency and throughput. “We built one architecture and sell it at every size,” Keller said. “The future of compute is open, scalable, and owned by the people building on it.”
The raise lands as demand for AI compute keeps outrunning supply. Open-weight models like those developers run locally through Ollama, or image generators such as Stable Diffusion and Flux, all run best on hardware designed for AI workloads — exactly the gap Tenstorrent is trying to fill against entrenched giants.
Source: Evertiq
