Tenstorrent Raises $1.5B Series E at $6.2B Valuation as Jim Keller's Chip Startup Takes On the AI Giants

Tenstorrent, the AI computing company led by veteran chip architect Jim Keller, has closed a $1.5 billion Series E at a $6.2 billion post-money valuation, more than doubling the $2.6 billion it was valued at in 2024.

The round was led by Trace Capital and Innovation X. New and existing investors including ARK Invest, Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, Morgan Stanley, Sandisk, Tether Investments, Cadence Ventures, Eclipse, Maverick Silicon and XTX Markets also took part.

An alternative to the AI chip giants Tenstorrent sells AI compute at every level, from a single card or workstation up to racks, superclusters and chip designs it licenses to other companies. Its software stack is open source, so developers can run frontier models on their own machines and enterprises can deploy models on their own premises. Customers designing their own chips with its technology include Samsung and LG.

The company says it will use the new money to deploy its Galaxy servers at scale, serving open-weight models for large language models and video generation, and to keep advancing the AI and CPU designs it licenses to customers building their own silicon.

Staying independent According to Axios and Bloomberg, Tenstorrent held early takeover talks earlier this year with Intel and Qualcomm but chose to stay independent. Bloomberg reported that a technical milestone in May, when its Galaxy servers showed they could run high-performance AI models developed by DeepSeek, helped shape that decision. The company declined to comment on "market speculation."

Why it matters for founders The raise shows investors are still willing to write very large cheques for alternatives to the dominant AI chip suppliers. As chip designers, governments and AI platforms look to own their compute rather than rent it, open hardware and licensable chip designs are becoming a business category in their own right.

Sources: Tenstorrent announcement, October 19, 2026; reporting by Axios and Bloomberg. Photo (illustrative circuit board): Tobias Hanf / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0