Tenstorrent, Jim Keller’s AI chip company, raises $1.5 billion and sees its valuation rise to $6.2 billion

Led by Trace Capital and Innovation X, this Series E funding round will finance the production of Galaxy servers and research into RISC-V, in the face of Nvidia’s dominance.

Toronto-based startup Tenstorrent, led by processor architect Jim Keller (who has worked for Intel, AMD, Apple and Tesla), has closed a $1.5 billion Series E round. The round is co-led by Trace Capital and Innovation X, with Protagonist, Morgan Stanley, Fidelity, ARK Invest and T. Rowe Price, among others. The valuation is $6.2 billion, more than double the $2.6 billion raised in the 2024 round.

From server to workstation, all in RISC-V

Initially a simple chip designer, Tenstorrent now sells a full range of Galaxy servers assembled in giant clusters, a liquid-cooled TT-QuietBox workstation and Blackhole PCIe cards, all built on its Tensix Neo accelerators and Ascalon cores with the open RISC-V instruction set. The company is also developing an open source software stack (the TT-Forge compiler, the TT-Metalium SDK and TT-LLK) to run PyTorch models on its hardware. Virtu Financial already uses the Galaxy servers for trading agents, and Equinix offers them to its customers.

The funds will be used to accelerate the production of Galaxy servers for training and inference of large language models and video generation, to fund research around RISC-V and to recruit internationally. "We have designed a single architecture and we sell it at all sizes," says Jim Keller.