Tenstorrent has raised $1.5B at a $6.2B valuation, more than doubling the $2.6B it carried out of late 2024.
Trace Capital, the new firm from Quiet Capital co-founder Ben Mahdavi, and Innovation X led the round. Cadence Ventures, Eclipse, Fidelity, SanDisk and T. Rowe Price also participated.
The timing answers a question that had been hanging over the ten-year-old company. Half a year has not yet passed since reports put Intel and Qualcomm in talks to buy it, with figures near the $5B mark floated.
Why Keller stayed solo
Chief executive Jim Keller told Bloomberg the decision went the other way after the company demonstrated its Galaxy servers running DeepSeek models. Staying independent beat selling into a larger chip roadmap.
Fresh capital is earmarked for inference silicon aimed at open-weight serving and at generating video. That is a narrower brief than training, and it reflects where the economics have moved. Inference is where the volume sits and where buyers are most willing to consider an alternative to Nvidia.
Tenstorrent is not alone in that lane. Etched has been fielding its own investment offers on the strength of a transformer-specific design, and a cluster of smaller teams are chasing the same serving workloads.
Doubling a valuation in two years is a statement about demand for inference silicon, not proof of it. The Galaxy results that convinced Keller to stay independent are the same numbers investors will want to see repeated at customer scale.
