Jim Keller's RISC-V AI chip company Tenstorrent raises a $1.5B Series E at a $6.2B valuation, more than doubling since 2024, to scale Galaxy servers and its licensable AI and CPU IP

Why it matters

【Key points】

RISC-V AI chip company Tenstorrent said on Oct 19 it closed a $1.5B Series E at a $6.2B post-money valuation. Reuters reported it around 19:40 CST, and the company's newsroom posted the announcement the same day. Trace Capital and Innovation X led; participants include ARK Invest, Fidelity, Morgan Stanley, Sandisk, T. Rowe Price, Tether Investments, Virtu Financial and XTX Markets.

Per Reuters, the valuation more than doubles the December 2024 round (about $693M at a $2B pre-money). Tenstorrent says the money will scale Galaxy server deployments serving open-weight LLMs and video generation and advance the AI and CPU IP it licenses; Samsung and LG already license its TT-Ascalon RISC-V CPU and Tensix cores. CEO Jim Keller led Apple A4/A5, AMD Zen and Tesla's FSD chip.

X posts picked up after 19:00 CST: ~15 in that hour, ~31 from 20:00, ~32 in the half hour after 21:00.

【Verifiable】

Tenstorrent: https://tenstorrent.com/en/newsroom/tenstorrent-announces-series-e

Reuters via Investing.com: https://www.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/ai-chip-startup-tenstorrent-more-than-doubles-its-valuation-to-62-billion-in-funding-round-4957179

Techmeme (incl. Bloomberg): https://www.techmeme.com/261019/p18

【Our read】

1. $1.5B is large for a non-Nvidia AI chip startup; a memory maker (Sandisk) and Tether on the cap table show capital betting on inference compute outside Nvidia's ecosystem.

2. The pitch is openness: license-free RISC-V, an open software stack and licensable IP, matching sovereign and inference buyers who want to own compute.

3. At $6.2B it is still far below leading GPU clouds and chipmakers; volume delivery and software maturity are next to watch.