- Tenstorrent positions itself as a viable alternative to Nvidia
- Startup plans to ramp up hiring for engineering roles following new funding
- Interoperability is a key appeal for Tenstorrent
AI chip startup Tenstorrent has secured $700 million in funding as part of an investment round valuing the company at $2.6 billion.
The investment, led by AFW Partners and Samsung Securities, also included funding pledges LG Electronics, Fidelity, and Bezos Expeditions, the venture capital firm launched by former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
The company says this funding will play a key role in enabling it to expand headcount, further develop supply chain capabilities, and build AI training servers to showcase its technologies.
Major expansion
Tenstorrent specializes in developing powerful, cost-efficient chips aimed specifically for use in AI development. Notably, the company uses open source technology in its development, enabling it to swerve pricey high-bandwidth memory (HBM) currently used by Nvidia.
Similarly, it also focuses heavily on interoperability with other providers, and has been a vocal proponent of the open-standard RISC-V processor architecture.
It’s this aspect of the firm’s operations which makes the Santa Clara-headquartered firm an appealing alternative to Nvidia, according to CEO Jim Keller.
“You can’t beat Nvidia if you use HBM, because Nvidia buys the most HBM and has a cost advantage. But they’ll never be able to bring the price down the way HBM is built into their products and their sockets,” Keller said in a statement.
Enterprises have been making efforts to seek alternatives to Nvidia in recent years amidst its meteoric rise to prominence in the global tech industry, and Tenstorrent is one of a number aiming to fill that void.
In March 2024, Toronto-based AI chip startup Taalas secured $50 million in funding – again with the aim of challenging the GPU-centricity of the industry created by Nvidia’s dominance.
While Tenstorrent is still a relatively young firm, it’s already secured around $150 million in contracts and is scaling significantly.
The company’s first chips to hit the market were manufactured as part of a deal with GlobalFoundries. The launch of Grayskull, Tenstorrent’s RISC-V alternative, was designed to be far easier to program and scale.
Future chip series will be built through a deal with TSMC and Samsung. This includes development of a 2nm AI Accelerator, but exact details on release dates are yet to be determined.
Long-term, the company intends to release a new AI processor every year.
Via Bloomberg