Everybody wants to get in on the artificial intelligence action. A literal boatload of chips will be required to powerful current and future AI applications. Some companies like NVIDIA have already profited immensely from this gold rush while others are gearing up to get their piece of the pie in the future. Tenstorrent is one such company.
It's aiming to break NVIDIA's dominance in the AI chip industry and it has now received a lot of funds from major investors. Samsung has joined Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and other investors in giving $700 million to Tenstorrent in its latest funding round, valuing the company north of $2.6 billion.
Samsung is betting on a company that's going after NVIDIA
Tenstorrent raised $700 million in capital through a funding round that was led by AFW Partners and Samsung Securities, both based in South Korea. Other investors include Bezos Expeditions, LG Electronics, and Fidelity. The company will use these funds to expand its engineering team, invest in the supply chain, and build AI training servers to showcase its technology.
Based in Santa Clara, California, Tenstorrent is developing chips with the idea of making the more cost-effective and power-efficient compared to the AI chips that NVIDIA sells. The focus remains on utilizing open-source technology to avoid the propriety and pricey components, like high-bandwidth memory, that NVIDIA uses.
“You can’t beat Nvidia if you use HBM, because Nvidia buys the most HBM and has a cost advantage,” said Tenstorrent CEO Jim Keller, “But they’ll never be able to bring the price down the way HBM is built into their products and their sockets.” Keller is a known quantity in the semiconductor industry given his previous experience working at Apple, Tesla, and AMD.
Tenstorrent is aiming to release new AI chips every two years. Its first chips were made by GlobalFoundries while the next iterations will be developed by Samsung Electronics and TSMC. It's designing for their 2nm process as well, aiming to align with their production estimate of 2025 for 2nm chips. If this investment works out well, it could lead to potentially lucrative orders for Samsung's foundry.
