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🚨 Jim Keller's Tenstorrent Just Raised $1.5 Billion to Take On Nvidia — and Its Valuation More Than Doubled

Jim Keller's AI chip startup Tenstorrent raised a $1.5B Series E at a $6.2B valuation, more than double its 2024 price.

By Tech Arcade··2 min read

Jim Keller's Tenstorrent Just Raised $1.5 Billion to Take On Nvidia — and Its Valuation More Than Doubled — Tech Arcade
Photo: Steve A Johnson / Unsplash

Tenstorrent, the AI chip startup run by legendary chip designer Jim Keller, has raised $1.5 billion in a Series E round that values it at $6.2 billion after the money (ACCESS Newswire).

The announcement landed at 8:00am Eastern this morning, 19 October. That price tag is more than double what investors paid less than two years ago (DCD).

If you’ve been watching the AI chip trade bleed lately, this is a loud vote of confidence in the challengers.

⚡ What Happened

  • The round: $1.5 billion Series E at a $6.2 billion post-money valuation, led by Trace Capital and Innovation X (ACCESS Newswire).
  • Who else is in: Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, Morgan Stanley, ARK Invest, Sandisk, Eclipse, XTX Markets and Tether Investments, among others.
  • The jump: In December 2024 Tenstorrent raised $693 million at a valuation of just over $2.6 billion (TechCrunch).
  • Where the money goes: deploying its Galaxy servers at scale, serving open-weight models for text and video generation, and pushing the chip IP it licenses to other companies.

“We built one architecture and sell it at every size.” — Jim Keller, CEO of Tenstorrent

🧠 Why It Matters

Keller is one of the few names in chips that gets investors to pick up the phone. He has worked on processor designs at AMD, Apple, Tesla and Intel, and now he’s betting on RISC-V, the open instruction set nobody has to pay a licence fee to use.

Tenstorrent sells across the whole stack: single cards, workstations, full racks, and designs that other chipmakers can license. Samsung and LG already license its CPU and AI cores (ACCESS Newswire).

Its Galaxy servers, which began shipping in April, pack 32 Blackhole processors for 23 petaflops of FP8 compute (DCD). That’s the product this money is meant to scale.

For you, the point is simple: every serious Nvidia alternative puts pressure on what AI compute costs. A $1.5 billion war chest lets Tenstorrent move from “interesting” to “shipping in volume”.

🔜 What To Watch

  • Customers. The release names licensees but no big new buyers for Galaxy servers. Watch for cloud or enterprise deals.
  • Next-generation hardware. DCD reports the company plans new generations of Galaxy servers with this money.
  • Consolidation. With chip startups raising at higher prices, a larger player may decide buying one is cheaper than building one.

Details on the round’s exact split between investors have not been disclosed.

Sources

❓ Quick answers

How much did Tenstorrent raise in its Series E?

Tenstorrent raised $1.5 billion at a $6.2 billion post-money valuation, announced on 19 October 2026 via ACCESS Newswire.

Who led Tenstorrent's $1.5 billion funding round?

Trace Capital and Innovation X led the round, joined by investors including Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, Morgan Stanley, ARK Invest and Sandisk, per the company's announcement.

What was Tenstorrent's previous valuation?

In December 2024 Tenstorrent raised $693 million at a valuation of more than $2.6 billion, according to TechCrunch, so the new $6.2 billion valuation is more than double.