Tenstorrent, a chip startup specializing in inference technology, has secured $1.5 billion in funding at a $6.2 billion valuation.

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This funding round arrives five months after the 10-year-old Nvidia competitor reportedly drew acquisition interest from Intel and Qualcomm, with valuations reaching as high as $5 billion. The new round more than doubled Tenstorrent's valuation from the $2.6 billion it achieved in late 2024. Trace Capital, a new firm launched by Quiet Capital co-founder Ben Mahdavi, and Innovation X led the investment. Additional participants included Cadence Ventures, Eclipse, Fidelity, SanDisk, and T. Rowe Price.

Jim Keller, a prominent microprocessor engineer and Tenstorrent CEO, told Bloomberg that the company chose to stay independent and raise additional capital after demonstrating that its Galaxy servers could run DeepSeek models. The fresh funding will be directed toward scaling chips designed for serving open-weight AI models and video generation.

Tenstorrent is part of a broader wave of AI hardware startups attempting to challenge Nvidia's market dominance.