Tenstorrent Secures $1.5B Funding, Skyrocketing Valuation to $6.2B in Challenge Against Nvidia
AI chip startup Tenstorrent has successfully raised a staggering $1.5 billion in a Series E funding round. This significant financial boost has catapulted the Santa Clara, California-based company’s valuation to $6.2 billion, more than doubling its previous valuation of $2.6 billion from December 2024.
The announcement, made on Monday, October 19, 2026, is one of the largest AI hardware funding rounds of the year. It highlights the increasing investor interest in alternatives to Nvidia’s dominant chip ecosystem.
The funding round was spearheaded by Trace Capital and Innovation X. It also saw participation from a diverse group of prominent investors, including:
- ARK Invest
- Fidelity Management & Research
- Morgan Stanley
- T. Rowe Price
- SanDisk
- Tether Investments
- Cadence Ventures
Tenstorrent plans to utilize the fresh capital to scale the production of its Galaxy servers. These servers, powered by dozens of the company’s proprietary AI chips, are designed to drive applications such as chatbots, coding assistants, and video generators.
Under the leadership of renowned chip engineer and CEO Jim Keller, Tenstorrent had previously attracted acquisition interest from both Intel and Qualcomm earlier in 2026. Despite valuations reportedly reaching up to $10 billion, the company chose to remain independent.
Keller attributed a pivotal demonstration in May — where Tenstorrent’s Galaxy servers successfully ran powerful DeepSeek AI models — as a turning point for the company. The company’s RISC-V-based chip architecture is specifically designed to handle AI inference workloads more efficiently. This offers businesses a flexible, lower-cost alternative to Nvidia’s proprietary hardware and software stack.
Source: TechCrunch – Tenstorrent hits $6.2B valuation to scale open-weight AI chips