Tenstorrent raises $1.5B Series E at a $6.2B valuation to scale inference chips for open-weight models
Confirmed
The takeaway
On Oct 19, 2026 AI chip startup Tenstorrent, led by Jim Keller, raised $1.5B in a Series E led by Trace Capital and Innovation X at a $6.2B valuation, up from $2.6B in late 2024.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 2 of 5
- Last verified
- 19 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra172 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.5111 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 4 Argon202 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7141 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 111 days before it.
Key facts
- Round: $1.5B Series E, led by Trace Capital (new firm of Quiet Capital co-founder Ben Mahdavi) and Innovation X; also Cadence Ventures, Eclipse, Fidelity, SanDisk, T. Rowe Price
- Valuation: $6.2B, more than double the $2.6B of late 2024 (when it raised $700M, per Techmeme’s summary of Bloomberg)
- Per TechCrunch: about five months earlier Intel and Qualcomm reportedly showed acquisition interest at valuations up to $5B; Keller told Bloomberg the company stayed independent after its Galaxy servers showed they could run DeepSeek models
- Use of funds: scaling inference chips for open-weight models and for video generation
What happened
Tenstorrent closed one of the largest 2026 rounds for a non-Nvidia AI chip company, positioning its hardware for serving open-weight models rather than frontier training.
Why it matters
Investor money is following the shift of AI spending toward inference, where cheap open-weight models such as DeepSeek’s run on hardware other than Nvidia’s.
Sources
2 sources from 2 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
2 sources: 2 press
Press
- TechCrunch: Tenstorrent hits $6.2B valuation to scale open-weight AI chipstechcrunch.com, press
- Bloomberg: AI chip startup Tenstorrent raises funds at $6.2 billion value (paywalled)bloomberg.com, press
Changes
- Filed (Techmeme/TechCrunch)