Tenstorrent, the AI chip and server company run by chip architect Jim Keller, has raised $1.5bn in a Series E round at a $6.2bn post-money valuation. The company announced the round on 19 October 2026.
Trace Capital and Innovation X led the financing. Agostinelli Group, ARK Invest, Brett Barna, 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 also took part.
Bloomberg reported that the new valuation is more than double the $2.6bn Tenstorrent was valued at in its previous round in 2024.
“The future of compute is open, scalable, and owned by the people building on it.”Jim Keller, CEO, Tenstorrent
What Tenstorrent does
Tenstorrent designs AI processors and sells them in several forms: single cards and workstations, its Galaxy servers, and full racks and clusters. It also licenses its designs, including the TT-Ascalon RISC-V CPU and its Tensix AI cores, to other chipmakers, and Samsung and LG are named as licensees. Its software stack is open source.
"We built one architecture and sell it at every size," Keller said, describing a product line that runs from developer hardware to data-centre clusters. The company said enterprises are deploying its systems on their own premises and developers are using them to run models locally.
"The future of compute is open, scalable, and owned by the people building on it," Keller said in the announcement. He was previously the architect behind Apple's A4 and A5 chips, AMD's Zen design and Tesla's Full Self-Driving chip.
The company was founded in 2016 and was originally based in Toronto, according to BetaKit. It now lists offices in Santa Clara, Austin, Toronto, Belgrade, Tokyo and Bangalore. Bloomberg put its headcount at 1,150.
Why it raised rather than sold
According to Bloomberg, Tenstorrent held preliminary talks earlier in 2026 with Intel, Qualcomm and other companies about a possible sale, while also courting new investors. The company decided to stay independent.
Bloomberg reported that Keller pointed to a demonstration in May, in which Tenstorrent's Galaxy servers ran large AI models from DeepSeek, as a turning point for the business.
Trace Capital, one of the two leads, is a newly launched firm, Bloomberg said. Sandisk and Cadence Ventures, the venture arm of chip design software maker Cadence Design Systems, joined as strategic investors.
Investors pointed to the combination of hardware and software. George Bousis, co-founder and managing partner of Protagonist, said few companies design both the chip and the software that runs on it, and that Tenstorrent's video generation results had come in ahead of his firm's expectations. Ben Mahdavi, founder of Trace Capital, cited the decades of silicon, software and IP experience of Keller and his team.
What the money is for
Tenstorrent said it will use the funding for volume manufacturing and global commercial expansion. That includes deploying Galaxy servers at scale, serving open-weight large language models and video generation models, and continuing to develop the AI and CPU designs it licenses to other companies.
The funding so far
Tenstorrent raised more than $200m in May 2021 in a round led by Fidelity Management and Research Company that valued it at $1bn, BetaKit reported at the time. In December 2024 it raised $693m in a Series D led by Samsung Securities and AFW Partners at a $2bn pre-money valuation, with LG Technology Ventures, Hyundai Motor Group, Fidelity, Baillie Gifford, XTX Markets and Bezos Expeditions among the participants.
The company did not disclose its total funding to date with the new round.
Company website: tenstorrent.com