Amazon partners with Samsung rival to design and build custom next-generation technology that will help AWS advance in the hyperscaler race
- Tenstorrent is positioning itself as a viable alternative to Nvidia
- Startup plans to ramp up hiring for tech roles following new funding
- Interoperability is a major draw for Tenstorrent
AI chip startup Tenstorrent has secured $700 million in funding as part of an investment round that values the company at $2.6 billion.
The investment, led by AFW Partners and Samsung Securities, also included funding commitments from LG Electronics, Fidelity and Bezos Expeditions, the venture capital firm launched by former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
The company says this funding will play a key role in expanding its workforce, further developing supply chain capabilities and building AI training servers to demonstrate its technologies.
Major expansion
Tenstorrent specializes in developing powerful, cost-efficient chips specifically intended for use in AI development. Notably, the company uses open source technology in its development, which allows it to bypass the expensive high-bandwidth memory (HBM) currently used by Nvidia.
Likewise, it also focuses heavily on interoperability with other providers, and is a vocal supporter of the open-standard RISC-V processor architecture.
It’s this aspect of the company’s business that makes the Santa Clara-headquartered company an attractive alternative to Nvidia, said CEO Jim Keller.
“You can’t beat Nvidia using HBM because Nvidia buys the most HBM and has a cost advantage. But they will never be able to drive down the price as HBM is built into their products and outlets,” Keller said in a statement.
Companies have been scrambling to find alternatives to Nvidia in recent years amid Nvidia’s meteoric rise in the global tech industry, and Tenstorrent is one of many looking to fill this void.
In March 2024, Toronto-based AI chip startup Taalas secured $50 million in funding – again aiming to challenge the industry’s GPU-centricity created by Nvidia’s dominance.
Although Tenstorrent is still a relatively young company, it has already secured approximately $150 million in contracts and is scaling significantly.
The company’s first chips to hit the market were manufactured as part of a deal with GlobalFoundries. The launch of Grayskull, Tenstorrent’s RISC-V alternative, was designed to be much easier to program and scale.
Future chip series will be built through a deal with TSMC and Samsung. This includes the development of a 2nm AI Accelerator, but exact details on release dates have yet to be determined.
In the long term, the company plans to release a new AI processor every year.
Via Bloomberg