Tenstorrent Raises $1.5 Billion at a $6.2 Billion Valuation After Sale Talks With Intel and Qualcomm
Tenstorrent, the AI chip company run by Jim Keller, said Oct. 19 it closed a $1.5 billion Series E at a $6.2 billion post-money valuation, the price once the new cash is counted. Trace Capital and Innovation X led the round. Its 2024 round valued it at $2.6 billion.
Earlier this year, Tenstorrent talked with Intel, Qualcomm and other companies about a possible sale while it was also looking for new backers, Quartz reports, citing Bloomberg. Keller told Bloomberg the company chose new funding over a sale, and he called a May demonstration of its Galaxy servers running DeepSeek models a turning point. “Once we had the ability to fundraise and demonstrate the performance and started to ship, the investor interest came in,” he said.
Trace Capital was founded this year by Ben Mahdavi, a Quiet Capital co-founder, and Innovation X, a late-stage venture firm, manages more than $4.5 billion. ARK Invest, Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, Morgan Stanley, Sandisk, Cadence Ventures, Tether Investments, Virtu Financial and XTX Markets are among the others in the round. Keller designed Apple’s A4 and A5 chips, AMD’s Zen and Tesla’s self-driving chip, according to the company, and Tenstorrent has 1,150 employees, Bloomberg reports.
What the money buys
The company says it will use the cash to deploy Galaxy servers at scale, running open-weight models, meaning AI models whose underlying parameters are published for anyone to run, and to advance the chip designs it licenses. It sells hardware from a single card or workstation up to racks and superclusters, with open-source software on top.
Tenstorrent also licenses its TT-Ascalon CPU and Tensix AI cores, built on RISC-V, an open chip design standard no single company owns, to chip designers including Samsung and LG, which build those cores into silicon of their own.
“People are looking for alternatives,” Keller told Bloomberg, in a market Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom dominate. He said Tenstorrent can compete on price and take orders that may be too small for larger competitors.
What staying independent cost
By the usual post-money arithmetic, $1.5 billion of new money in a $6.2 billion company works out to roughly 24% of Tenstorrent going to the Series E investors.
Two companies the release names as licensees also appear among Tenstorrent’s earlier backers, listed there as Samsung and LG Electronics. A sale to Intel or Qualcomm would have put the cores Samsung and LG license inside one of the largest chipmakers in the business.
Keller described the growth plan to Bloomberg as a ladder. “People say, ‘How do you grow to be a $10 billion business?’ Well, you start with $10 million and $100 million, then $500 million,” he said. Neither the company’s release nor Bloomberg’s reporting, as Quartz relays it, says which rung Tenstorrent stands on today.
Sources
- Tenstorrent: Tenstorrent Announces a $1.5B Series E at a $6.2B Valuation (Oct. 19, 2026)
- Quartz: Tenstorrent raised $1.5 billion, more than doubling its valuation to $6.2 billion (Cris Tolomia, Oct. 19, 2026)
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