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# Jim Keller's Tenstorrent Raises $1.5 Billion to Scale Its RISC-V AI Servers
- URL: https://digirolla.com/jim-kellers-tenstorrent-raises-1-5-billion-to-scale-its-risc-v-ai-servers/
- Published: 2026-10-21T07:10:04.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-21T07:10:04.000Z
- Description: The Santa Clara chip company closed a $1.5 billion Series E at a $6.2 billion post-money valuation, and says it will use the money to deploy its Galaxy servers at scale and grow its chip IP licensing business.
- Author: Digirolla
- Tags: Hardware

Tenstorrent, the AI chip company led by veteran chip architect Jim Keller, has closed a **$1.5 billion Series E** funding round at a **$6.2 billion post-money valuation**. The company announced the round on Monday, October 19.

According to Reuters, the new valuation more than doubles Tenstorrent's value from its previous round in December 2024, when it raised more than $693 million at a $2 billion pre-money valuation in a round led by Samsung Securities and AFW Partners.

## Who's investing

The Series E was led by Trace Capital and Innovation X. Tenstorrent lists a long roster of new and existing investors taking part, including:

- ARK Invest
- Fidelity Management & Research Company
- Morgan Stanley
- T. Rowe Price
- Sandisk
- Tether Investments
- XTX Markets, Virtu Financial, Eclipse, Maverick Silicon, Cadence Ventures, Protagonist, Agostinelli Group, Troluce Capital and Brett Barna

Tether separately confirmed its participation on October 20.

## Where the money goes

Tenstorrent says it will use the capital to deploy its **Galaxy servers** at scale, continue serving open-weight models across large language models and video generation, and advance the AI and CPU IP it licenses to companies designing their own chips. Reuters describes Galaxy servers as systems that combine dozens of Tenstorrent's AI chips to run applications such as chatbots, coding assistants and video generators.

The company also says the round will fund volume manufacturing and global commercial expansion.

## Built on RISC-V

Tenstorrent builds AI processors and systems based on **RISC-V**, an open-source instruction set architecture. As Reuters explains, RISC-V lets companies design processors without paying license fees and reduces their dependence on proprietary chip ecosystems such as Arm's.

Tenstorrent sells hardware at several sizes, from a single card or workstation up to racks and superclusters, alongside an open-source software stack. It also licenses its TT-Ascalon RISC-V CPU and Tensix AI cores to other chip designers. The company names Samsung and LG among those licensees.

"We built one architecture and sell it at every size," Keller said in the announcement. "The future of compute is open, scalable, and owned by the people building on it."

## Investor claims

Investors used the announcement to praise the company's technology. George Bousis, co-founder and managing partner at Protagonist, said that Tenstorrent's "video generation results beat industry benchmarks ahead of our expectations." Tenstorrent did not publish the benchmark data behind that claim in the release.

Ben Mahdavi, founder of lead investor Trace Capital, said the firm is "excited to partner with Tenstorrent as Galaxy continues to scale."

## About the company

Tenstorrent is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and has offices in Austin, Toronto, Belgrade, Tokyo and Bangalore. Keller is known for his work on Apple's A4 and A5 chips, AMD's Zen architecture and Tesla's Full Self-Driving chip. Earlier backers include Bezos Expeditions, Samsung, LG Electronics and Hyundai Motor Group.

## Sources

- [Tenstorrent: Tenstorrent Announces a $1.5B Series E at a $6.2B valuation](https://tenstorrent.com/en/newsroom/tenstorrent-announces-series-e?ref=digirolla.com)
- [Reuters via CNA: AI chip startup Tenstorrent more than doubles its valuation to $6.2 billion](https://www.channelnewsasia.com/business/ai-chip-startup-tenstorrent-more-doubles-its-valuation-62-billion-in-funding-round-6471861?ref=digirolla.com)
- [Tether: Tether Invests in Tenstorrent](https://tether.io/news/tether-invests-in-tenstorrent-to-expand-access-to-open-ai-computing-infrastructure/?ref=digirolla.com)