Few chip startups get a second swing at Nvidia with a bigger cheque than the first. Tenstorrent just did.
The Toronto company banked $1.5B in Series E paper led jointly by Trace Capital and Innovation X, lifting its worth to $6.2B. That is more than double the roughly $2.6B it carried after a December 2024 round of about $693M. Fidelity, ARK Invest, T. Rowe Price, Morgan Stanley, SanDisk, Tether Investments and Cadence Ventures joined.
Chief executive Jim Keller, a chip architect with stints at Intel, AMD, Apple and Tesla, has pushed Tenstorrent past selling bare silicon. It now ships Galaxy servers, TT-QuietBox liquid-cooled workstations and Blackhole PCIe cards, all built on RISC-V cores through its Ascalon CPUs and Tensix Neo accelerators. An open software stack (TT-Forge, TT-Metalium, TT-LLK) lets developers move PyTorch workloads across the range.
The money funds a production ramp for Galaxy systems, RISC-V research and hiring. The pitch is that buyers want an architecture they control rather than a locked runtime.
The shadow of a takeover that never happened
Raising again reopens an awkward question. Reports in June said Qualcomm was in talks to buy Tenstorrent for $8B to $10B. No agreement followed, and the startup has now chosen independence with fresh capital instead.
Competition is crowded. Etched doubled its valuation to $21B in August after landing a first production customer, and Efficient Computer closed more than $97M at $650M on a chip it says is already shipping in volume.
Tenstorrent’s advantage is breadth: one architecture spanning a desktop workstation to a supercluster. Its problem is the same one facing every challenger, which is proving that open RISC-V silicon can match CUDA on the workloads buyers actually run.
