Tenstorrent hits $6.2B valuation on Oct 19 to scale open-weight AI silicon
A TechCrunch In Brief on Oct 19 reports Tenstorrent hit $6.2B valuation in its latest round; the open-weight AI chip company led by Jim Keller has deals with Hyundai and others
On October 19, a TechCrunch In Brief reported that open-weight AI chip company Tenstorrent reached a $6.2 billion valuation in its latest funding round, the highest yet for the company.
Tenstorrent is led by veteran chip architect Jim Keller and has spent the last several years pushing the concept of open-weight AI silicon — hardware designed to support open models rather than lock customers into a specific CUDA ecosystem. The approach positions Tenstorrent alongside Amazon Trainium, Tesla Dojo, and Cerebras as part of a growing pushback against Nvidia's GPU-plus-CUDA dominance.
Past partners include Hyundai, LG, and Foxconn. Proceeds from the round will extend silicon design and the global engineering footprint to push open-weight chips toward volume production and commercial deployment. The valuation jump comes against a backdrop of late-October debate over labor displacement by AI agents, the Apple v. OpenAI trade-secrets case, and growing investor appetite for diversified compute suppliers.