Tenstorrent raises $1.5 billion, valued at $6.2 billion
The AI chip maker has secured $1.5 billion in a Series E round, lifting its valuation to $6.2 billion as it expands its open‑weight chip platform.
19 Oct 2026 0 reads Compiled with AI
Tenstorrent, a Santa Clara‑based AI chip startup, closed a $1.5 billion Series E round that lifted its post‑money valuation to $6.2 billion. The round was led by Trace Capital and Innovation X and attracted a mix of existing and new investors, including Cadence Ventures, Eclipse, Fidelity, SanDisk, and T. Rowe Price. The company said it will use the capital to scale its Galaxy servers and broaden its open‑weight AI platform.
The firm builds RISC‑V‑based processors that combine Tensix AI cores with a TT‑Ascalon RISC‑V CPU. Its Galaxy servers aggregate multiple accelerators to run large‑language models, coding assistants and video‑generation workloads. Tenstorrent also licenses its chip IP to other designers, such as Samsung and LG, and offers an open‑source software stack that lets developers run frontier models on premises.
Scaling the Platform
With the new funding, Tenstorrent plans to scale deployment of its Galaxy platform, deploying it in data centres worldwide. The capital will also be used to continue serving open‑weight models across large‑language models and video generation, while advancing the AI and CPU intellectual property it licenses to customers designing their own silicon. The company’s strategy is to offer an end‑to‑end stack that runs at every scale, from a single card to a supercluster.
CEO Jim Keller said the round was a vote of confidence that the company’s open‑compute vision can compete with the dominant GPU ecosystem. Trace Capital founder Ben Mahdavi added that the firm’s experience in silicon, software and IP gives the partnership a unique edge. Protagonist’s co‑founder George Bousis praised the company’s video‑generation results, noting they beat industry benchmarks.
Market Context
Tenstorrent’s valuation more than doubled from the $2.6 billion it fetched in late 2024, after a series of rounds that drew interest from Intel, Qualcomm and other major players. The funding comes amid a broader push by AI hardware firms to reduce dependence on Nvidia’s GPU‑centric platform, a trend highlighted by the company’s open‑source approach and its use of a royalty‑free instruction set.