Tenstorrent

Tenstorrent is an AI chip company founded in 2016 and led by Jim Keller as CEO — the legendary chip architect behind AMD Zen CPU, Intel Silicon Engineering Group, Tesla Full Self-Driving chip, and Apple M1. The company raised $800 million at a $3.2 billion valuation from investors including Fidelity Management, Jeff Bezos Bezos Expeditions, Samsung Securities, AFW Partners, and LG Electronics, bringing total funding to approximately $1 billion.

Headquartered in Austin, Texas with engineering in Toronto, Tenstorrent builds AI chips and licensable IP based on a novel RISC-V CPU plus Tensix AI core architecture that delivers high-efficiency inference and training across edge devices, servers, and cloud deployments. Unlike GPU-based approaches that require proprietary software ecosystems, Tenstorrent built an open-source software stack (tt-metal) and RISC-V foundation that allows customers to deeply customise compute behaviour without vendor lock-in.

The scalable mesh interconnect allows systems to grow from a single chip to massive clusters without architectural changes. Tenstorrent has secured over $150 million in contracts from LG Electronics, Hyundai Motor Group, and Samsung Electronics to design custom AI SoCs based on its Tensix and Ascalon RISC-V IP, positioning it as a leading AI chip IP licensor alongside its own hardware products.

The Wormhole n300 and n150 cards deliver competitive transformer throughput at lower power consumption than GPU equivalents, targeting inference workloads in robots, autonomous vehicles, and edge AI devices. The company plans to launch a new processor generation every two years and is aggressively licensing its Ascalon RISC-V CPU cores and Tensix AI engines to SoC manufacturers globally, targeting a $7 billion AI inference chip market growing at 35% annually.

Jim Keller publicly positions Tenstorrent as the open-architecture alternative to the NVIDIA CUDA ecosystem for the next decade of AI computing.