Tenstorrent raises $1.5B at $6.2B to scale Galaxy servers

Tenstorrent, the AI chip company run by Jim Keller, raised $1.5 billion at a $6.2 billion valuation on October 19, 2026. The round more than doubles its value since 2024. It also gives one of the few independent challengers to Nvidia the money to build servers in volume.

The round

Tenstorrent's announcement calls it a Series E, a late-stage funding round. The $6.2 billion figure is a post-money valuation, meaning it includes the new cash. Two investment firms led the round: Trace Capital, founded by Ben Mahdavi in Los Angeles, and New York's Innovation X.

Many others joined. The company lists ARK Invest, Fidelity, Morgan Stanley, T. Rowe Price, Sandisk, Tether Investments, XTX Markets and Virtu Financial among them. Earlier backers include Samsung, LG Electronics, Hyundai Motor Group and Bezos Expeditions, Jeff Bezos's investment firm.

The step up is large. Tenstorrent was valued at $2.6 billion after its 2024 round, The Next Web reports, citing Bloomberg. Capital Brief gives the same figure. The Globe and Mail puts the earlier deal at $2 billion, when the company raised $693 million.

Detail	Figure
New money	$1.5 billion
Valuation after the round	$6.2 billion
Valuation after the 2024 round	$2.6 billion (Bloomberg, via The Next Web)
Staff	About 1,150 (Bloomberg) or 1,000 (The Globe and Mail)
Founded	Toronto, about 10 years ago (The Globe and Mail)

What Tenstorrent sells

Tenstorrent sells AI computing "at every size," from one card or workstation up to racks and large clusters. Its main product is Galaxy, a server that runs open-weight AI models. Those are models whose files anyone can download, such as chatbots, coding assistants and video generators.

The company also licenses its chip designs to other firms. Its announcement names two: the TT-Ascalon CPU core and the Tensix AI core. Samsung and LG are among the chip designers using them.

The CPU design is based on RISC-V, an open set of processor instructions that anyone can build on without paying a license fee. Tenstorrent's software stack is open source too, so developers can see and change the code that drives the chips.

"We built one architecture and sell it at every size," Keller said in the announcement. He was an architect of Apple's A4 and A5 chips, AMD's Zen design and Tesla's self-driving chip.

Why it chose money over a sale

Intel and Qualcomm each held takeover talks with Tenstorrent earlier this year, Bloomberg reported in May. The Globe and Mail says each reportedly offered upward of $5 billion, which it could not confirm.

Keller told The Next Web the company chose to raise money instead. He named one turning point: a May demonstration in which Galaxy servers ran DeepSeek's models.

Investors are betting on that mix of chips and code. "Few companies design the chip and the software that runs on it. Tenstorrent does both," said George Bousis of Protagonist, one of the investors.

The company says the money will go to two things. One is deploying Galaxy servers at scale. The other is improving the chip designs it licenses. The Globe and Mail adds that Tenstorrent claims faster AI inference, the work of running a trained model, than Nvidia's graphics chips. No independent test of that claim appears in the reports.

What this means for developers

A well-funded rival gives teams that run open-weight models a second supplier to price against Nvidia. That only helps if your models run well on it.

• Test your model on the open stack. The software is open source, so you can check support for your model before buying hardware. Do that before any sales call.
• Ask for independent numbers. The speed claim against Nvidia comes from Tenstorrent itself. Request results on your own workload, measured as cost per token served.
• Watch the licensing side. Tenstorrent cores already go into chips from Samsung and LG. Your next device or server may carry its designs without its name on the box.
• Plan for on-premises use. Galaxy targets companies that run models in their own data centers. If your data cannot leave your building, it belongs on your shortlist.
• Track delivery, not funding. The money is for building servers in volume. Ask about lead times, because supply is what decides whether a second vendor is real.