Tenstorrent, a Toronto-based maker of AI computing hardware, has raised $1.5 billion in a late-stage Series E round at a valuation of $6.2 billion. The round was led jointly by two investment firms, with participants including Morgan Stanley, Fidelity, ARK Invest and T. Rowe Price. Jim Keller, the company's chief executive, is widely regarded as a veteran of the semiconductor industry who earlier helped design processors for Intel, AMD, Apple and Tesla.
The company started as a chip designer but now sells complete AI platforms. Its best-selling product is the Galaxy server, an enterprise system that can be combined into larger clusters. It also sells a liquid-cooled desktop AI workstation and Blackhole cards, PCIe boards with RISC-V cores and GDDR6 memory that can be networked to pool memory and compute. Its hardware uses accelerators and CPUs based on the open RISC-V instruction set, and its open-source software stack includes a compiler that bridges frameworks such as PyTorch to its chips.
Customers include a trading firm that uses Galaxy servers for on-premises AI trading agents, and a data centre operator that offers them to enterprises. The company says it will use the money to ramp up Galaxy production for global deployment, advance RISC-V research and expand its workforce.
Keller said the company has built one architecture and sells it at every size, and that the future of compute is open, scalable and owned by the people building on it. An industry analyst said Nvidia is no longer the only option, and an investor said few companies design both the chip and the software that runs on it.
