AI chip startup Tenstorrent raises $693 million, deepening its rivalry with Nvidia

Start-up creating artificial intelligence chips Tentorrent with the ambition to take on Nvidia Corp. announced today it closed late-stage funding of over $693 million at a pre-money valuation of $2 billion.

Samsung Securities and AFW Partners led the Series D funding round. The fundraising also attracted participation from many notable investors, including XTX Markets, Corner Capital, MESH, Export Development Canada, LG Electronics, Hyundai Motor Group, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Baillie Gifford, Bezos Expeditions and more.

Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Tenstorrent builds and sells computing systems designed for AI workloads developed around the company’s Tensix cores. The company has placed its vision around breaking Nvidia’s stranglehold on the chip silicon market by designing more affordable hardware for training and deploying AI by avoiding expensive components such as large-scale memory. bandwidth used by Nvidia.

“You can’t beat Nvidia if you use HBM, because Nvidia buys the most HBM and has a cost advantage,” Jim Keller, general manager of Tenstorrent. told Bloomberg. “But they will never be able to drive down prices the way HBM is integrated into their products and their outlets.”

To reach more potential customers, the company is focusing on designing hardware that is interoperable with other vendors. It uses an open standard RISC-V processor architecturewhich is designed to enable a more open ecosystem for engineers and developers to adopt its processors and systems into their data center and server setups.

To achieve this, Tenstorrent licenses AI and RISC-V intellectual property to customers who want to own and customize silicon for specialized use. RISC-V is an open source instruction architecture for developing custom processors for different applications, based on a so-called “reduced instruction set”, making it easier to use, adapt and implement. optimization of power, performance and functionality.

The company said it will use the new funding to build open source AI software stacks and hire developers to expand the global development and design centers. This will allow the company to create systems and clouds that AI developers can use and test models on its systems.

“We find Tenstorrent’s open source approach refreshing, especially in the proprietary and often secretive world of AI accelerators,” said Joshua Leahy, chief technology officer of XTX Markets.

As the company begins to grow with the new funding, it will face headwinds in a market where Nvidia is ascendant. However, Keller remains confident that by providing a more affordable AI chip that can be tailored to business needs and releasing a new processor every two years, it can help maintain a commercially viable product in the industry AI chips.

Image: Torrent