Tenstorrent raises $1.5B at $6.2B valuation after passing on a possible sale

Tenstorrent, the inference-focused chip startup led by veteran processor designer Jim Keller, has raised $1.5 billion at a $6.2 billion valuation, TechCrunch reports. That is more than double the $2.6 billion valuation from late 2024, and it comes five months after Intel and Qualcomm reportedly showed acquisition interest at valuations of up to $5 billion. Trace Capital and Innovation X led the round, with Cadence Ventures, Eclipse, Fidelity, SanDisk and T. Rowe Price participating. Keller told Bloomberg the company chose independence after demonstrating that its Galaxy servers could run DeepSeek models. The money goes toward chips built to serve open-weight AI models and video generation.

Tenstorrent is about ten years old and positions itself as an inference specialist rather than a training-chip competitor. Open-weight models are those whose parameters are published for anyone to run, as opposed to closed models served only through a company’s own API.

The AI hardware market has long depended heavily on one company, and inference is where costs accumulate once models start answering real requests. A chip company that explicitly targets open-weight models is building for the part of the ecosystem anyone can download, modify and run, which benefits developers and buyers who do not want every workload priced by a single vendor. A well-funded alternative supplier also strengthens enterprises’ negotiating leverage on inference costs. Efforts like AWS TorchNeuron (TorchNeuron) show the same push against NVIDIA’s software advantage.

Keller’s DeepSeek demonstration aims at the open-weight world, where Chinese labs have been among the most aggressive releasers. That is commercially smart but ties Tenstorrent to a model supply that is politically contested in Washington; tighter restrictions on Chinese models could make its most compelling demos harder to sell to some customers.

Passing on a possible acquisition keeps control of the roadmap but means competing alone against NVIDIA’s software lock-in, long the real moat. A large round buys time, not developers, so software and tooling need to keep pace with hardware. Tenstorrent sits in a crowded wave of NVIDIA challengers; TechCrunch reports Etched has fielded offers at $40 billion or more, and valuations are climbing fast. NVIDIA, for its part, is financing parts of the custom-silicon market (NVIDIA and MediaTek). Beating NVIDIA on a benchmark is easier than winning procurement. More in our Nvidia coverage, funding coverage and startups coverage.