HedgeCo.Net — AI computing company Tenstorrent said on Monday it has closed a $1.5 billion Series E at a $6.2 billion post-money valuation, more than doubling the $2.6 billion valuation it reached in late 2024. The round was led by Trace Capital and Innovation X, with participation from new and existing investors including ARK Invest, Cadence Ventures, Eclipse, Fidelity Management & Research, Maverick Silicon, Morgan Stanley, Protagonist, Sandisk, T. Rowe Price, Tether Investments, Virtu Financial and XTX Markets.
Tenstorrent, led by chief executive Jim Keller, the chip architect behind Apple’s A4 and A5, AMD’s Zen and Tesla’s Full Self-Driving chip, builds RISC-V-based AI processors and systems. The company said it will use the capital to deploy its Galaxy servers at scale, keep serving open-weight models across large language models and video generation, and advance the AI and CPU intellectual property it licenses to customers designing their own silicon, a list that includes Samsung and LG.
The round comes about five months after Tenstorrent reportedly drew acquisition interest from Intel and Qualcomm at valuations of as much as $5 billion, TechCrunch reported. Keller told Bloomberg the company chose to stay independent and raise more capital after showing its Galaxy servers could run DeepSeek models. “We built one architecture and sell it at every size,” Keller said in the announcement.
The investor list is the part allocators should study. Trace Capital, one of the two leads, was founded in 2026 by Quiet Capital co-founder Ben Mahdavi, and the round blends late-stage venture money with crossover mutual fund managers such as Fidelity and T. Rowe Price, a strategic in Sandisk, and electronic trading firms Virtu and XTX. That mix shows how AI hardware rounds have moved beyond traditional venture funds into the balance sheets of asset managers and trading firms that want exposure to inference compute before any public listing.
Tenstorrent is one of several AI hardware startups trying to take share from Nvidia in inference. The next tests are volume manufacturing and customer deployments of Galaxy systems, and whether its licensing model can win more chip designers as sovereign buyers and inference platforms look for alternatives to a single supplier.