Tenstorrent hits $6.2B valuation to scale open-weight AI chips

Tenstorrent has pulled in $1.5 billion and is now valued at $6.2 billion, a sharp jump from the $2.6 billion price tag it carried in late 2024. The chip startup, which focuses on inference, is betting that there’s room for a smaller player to keep making serious hardware while Nvidia still owns the center of the market.

The round arrived five months after reports that Intel and Qualcomm had looked at buying the company at valuations of up to $5 billion. Instead of selling, Tenstorrent chose to stay independent and raise more money. That decision came after the company showed that its Galaxy servers could run DeepSeek models, according to CEO Jim Keller.

Trace Capital led the round. It’s a new firm launched by Quiet Capital co-founder Ben Mahdavi, and Innovation X also joined in. The rest of the backers included Cadence Ventures, Eclipse, Fidelity, SanDisk, and T. Rowe Price.

Tenstorrent says the fresh cash will help it scale chips built for serving open-weight AI models and video generation. That puts it in the same bruising race as a wave of AI hardware startups trying to chip away at Nvidia’s dominance. Etched is another one, and TechCrunch reported earlier this month that it had been fielding investment offers at valuations of $40 billion or more. Silicon still loves a chip story when the story is “anything but Nvidia.”