The Tenstorrent Series E closed on Monday at $1.5 billion and a $6.2 billion post-money valuation, more than double the $2.6 billion Bloomberg reported for the company’s 2024 round. Trace Capital and Innovation X led it. Fidelity and ARK Invest are in the round, and so, oddly, are Sandisk and Tether Investments.

Earlier this year Bloomberg reported that Tenstorrent had held takeover talks with companies including Intel and Qualcomm. Jim Keller now tells Bloomberg the company chose to raise money instead of selling. In June I counted Tenstorrent among Qualcomm’s four acquisitions in my Modular piece, and that was wrong: it was talks, and the company stayed independent. The RISC-V cost post that followed had the right word, leaked, and I should have used it the first time.

The money goes to deploying Galaxy servers at scale and to developing the AI and CPU designs Tenstorrent licenses to companies building their own chips, Samsung and LG among them. Everything is RISC-V, and the software stack is published as open source. Keller says a May demonstration of Galaxy servers running DeepSeek models was the turning point. When he told EE Times that Tenstorrent would beat Cerebras on everything, a raise this size is the first thing that makes the line more than bravado. AMD buying Taalas, which I wrote up in August, was the same bet from the other side: that GPUs are the wrong tool for inference.

1,150 employees, per Bloomberg. That is small for what Keller is promising.

The next number I want is a customer count, and I haven’t seen one in any of the coverage.

Sources