Tenstorrent Raises $1.5 Billion as Valuation Jumps to $6.2 Billion

AI chipmaker Tenstorrent said on Monday, Oct. 19, 2026, that it has closed a Tenstorrent Series E round worth $1.5 billion at a $6.2 billion post-money valuation. The raise more than doubles the company’s value from its last round in December 2024 and gives CEO Jim Keller fresh money to build Galaxy servers at volume as the company tries to win business away from Nvidia.

Image: LG Electronics CEO William Cho (left) and Tenstorrent CEO Jim Keller at LG Twin Towers in Seoul, November 2024. Photo: LG Electronics, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

The Tenstorrent Series E deal at a glance

• Size: $1.5 billion in new equity.
• Valuation: $6.2 billion post-money, including the new cash.
• Announced: Oct. 19, 2026, with the round described by the company as closed.
• Lead investors: Trace Capital and Innovation X.
• Previous round: more than $693 million in December 2024 at a $2 billion pre-money valuation, according to Reuters.
• Use of funds: deploying Galaxy servers at scale and advancing the AI and CPU designs Tenstorrent licenses to other chipmakers.

Tenstorrent’s own announcement lists a long roster of participants beyond the two leads, including Agostinelli Group, ARK Invest, Cadence Ventures, Eclipse, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Maverick Silicon, Morgan Stanley, Protagonist, Sandisk, T. Rowe Price, Tether Investments, Troluce Capital, Virtu Financial and XTX Markets. Trace Capital is a Los Angeles firm founded this year by Ben Mahdavi, a former NFL linebacker who co-founded Quiet Capital, according to the company and The Globe and Mail. Innovation X is a New York late-stage venture firm that reports more than $4.5 billion under management.

What Tenstorrent builds

Tenstorrent designs AI processors and complete systems based on RISC-V, an open chip instruction set that companies can use without paying license fees. Reuters noted that the approach lets customers design processors without depending on proprietary ecosystems such as Arm’s. The company sells hardware at several sizes, from a single card or workstation up to racks and large clusters, and pairs it with an open-source software stack.

Its flagship Galaxy servers combine dozens of its AI chips and are aimed at running chatbots, coding assistants and video generators. The company says it will keep focusing on open-weight models, the kind whose parameters anyone can download and modify, for both language and video generation. It also licenses its TT-Ascalon RISC-V CPU and Tensix AI cores to chip designers, and it names Samsung and LG among them.

Keller is one of the best-known chip architects in the industry. Tenstorrent’s announcement credits him with the Apple A4 and A5, AMD’s Zen design and Tesla’s Full Self-Driving chip. He was the company’s first investor and became CEO in 2023, the same year Tenstorrent moved its base from Toronto to the United States, The Globe and Mail reported. The paper said Toronto is still one of the largest hubs, with about 200 of roughly 1,000 employees. The company also lists operations in Santa Clara, Austin, Belgrade, Tokyo and Bangalore.

Why the Tenstorrent valuation matters for the AI chip race

The new round lands in the middle of a crowded fight over inference, the work of running AI models once they are trained. Nvidia’s graphics processors dominate both training and inference, and the company has passed $5 trillion in market value. Several startups now pitch chips tuned for faster, cheaper inference. The Globe and Mail pointed to Cerebras Systems, which went public earlier this year, and noted that large buyers such as OpenAI and Meta are also designing their own chips with Broadcom.

The Globe and Mail also reported that Intel and Qualcomm had each tried earlier this year to buy Tenstorrent for more than $5 billion. The new valuation sits above that figure. For readers tracking where all this hardware gets built, our map of new U.S. AI chip plants shows how tight supply remains, and our report on Germany’s industrial AI pact with Nvidia shows how governments are lining up behind the market leader.

The money also reflects a wider bet on the infrastructure around AI. Closer to home, Woburn-based VEIR raised $110 million last week to bring superconducting power lines to AI data centers, a reminder that chips are only one part of the buildout.

What comes next

Tenstorrent did not give a timeline for shipping Galaxy systems at the new scale, and it did not disclose revenue. The open questions are whether it can turn its licensing deals and open software into steady hardware orders, and whether investors’ enthusiasm for Nvidia alternatives holds up after a volatile stretch for AI stocks.

What executives and investors said

“We built one architecture and sell it at every size,” Keller said in the announcement. “The future of compute is open, scalable, and owned by the people building on it.”

Mahdavi said Keller and his team “bring decades of hands-on silicon, software, and IP experience.” George Bousis, co-founder and managing partner at Protagonist, said that “few companies design the chip and the software that runs on it” and that Tenstorrent’s video generation results “beat industry benchmarks ahead of our expectations.”

Sources

• Tenstorrent: Tenstorrent Announces a $1.5B Series E at a $6.2B valuation
• Reuters via CNA: AI chip startup Tenstorrent more than doubles its valuation to $6.2 billion
• The Globe and Mail: Nvidia challenger Tenstorrent raises $1.5-billion
• Wikimedia Commons: photo of William Cho and Jim Keller (LG Electronics, CC BY 2.0)