Tenstorrent has opted to build rather than sell. The Santa Clara, California-based AI inference chipmaker said Monday it had raised $1.5 billion at a $6.2 billion post-money valuation, in a round led by Trace Capital and Innovation X.¹

The financing follows a period in which the 10-year-old Nvidia challenger was reportedly courted by Intel and Qualcomm, with possible valuations reaching $5 billion. Instead, CEO Jim Keller and his team chose to remain independent after demonstrating that Tenstorrent’s Galaxy servers could run DeepSeek models, according to one account of the decision.²

That choice represents a sharp vote of confidence in a business that began with chips and has steadily widened its ambitions. Tenstorrent has licensed its designs to companies seeking their own AI silicon, then expanded into servers; it says the new money will help scale manufacturing.¹

The latest valuation is more than double the $2.6 billion Tenstorrent fetched in late 2024. Its new funding is earmarked for chips designed to serve open-weight AI models and video generation, putting the company in the increasingly crowded contest to loosen Nvidia’s grip on AI computing.²

The two accounts agree on the core wager: takeover speculation has given way, at least for now, to a far larger independent push. With investors ranging from Fidelity and T. Rowe Price to Cadence Ventures and SanDisk, Tenstorrent is not merely selling an alternative processor. It is financing the manufacturing and server capacity needed to make that alternative matter.¹