Samsung, Jeff Bezos back Nvidia rival Tenstorrent in startup chipmaker's nearly $700 million funding round

• Tenstorrent just closed its latest funding round, valuing the company at about $2.6 billion.
• The startup computing company aims to rival Nvidia with more affordable AI chips and processing.
• The nearly $700 million round attracted investors Samsung, Bezos Expeditions, and LG Electronics.

In its latest funding round, Tenstorrent, a startup computing company that builds powerful AI hardware and software to compete with Nvidia, attracted big-name investors — including Jeff Bezos and Samsung.

A company statement released Monday said its Series D funding round raised $693 million, valuing the AI chip startup at about $2.6 billion, per Bloomberg. Samsung Securities and AFW Partners, a venture capital investment firm based in Seoul, led the round, along with Bezos Expeditions, LG Electronics, and Hyundai Motor Group, among other investors, Tenstorrent announced.

"We are excited by the breadth of investors that believe in our vision," Tenstorrent COO Keith Witek said in the statement. "If you look at this group, you see a balance of financial investors and strategic investors, as well as some notable individuals that have conviction in our plans for AI. They respect our team, our technology, and our vision. They see the ~$150M in deals closed as a strong signal of commercial traction and opportunity in the market."

Tenstorrent was founded in 2016 by Ljubisa Bajic, Ivan Hamer, and Milos Trajkovic. In 2020, Jim Keller, a prolific microprocessor engineer known for his work at Apple and Tesla, joined the company as its chief technology officer and became CEO in 2023. The operation, with 10 offices worldwide, builds AI hardware, offers open-source software for chip builders, and licenses products to clients who want to design their own silicon.

While still a fraction of the size of Nvidia, Tenstorrent aims to siphon off a portion of the chipmaking giant's massive market share by offering increased interoperability with other tech providers using an open-source approach that relies on more commonplace technology, Bloomberg reported.

Tenstorrent advocates the use of an open standard instruction set architecture called RISC-V. Designed by computer scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, RISC-V defines how software controls the CPU in a computer and is offered under royalty-free open-source licenses.

Nvidia's approach has instead focused more on the proprietary, from its chips to specific data center layouts, making it difficult for some of Nvidia's customers to switch to chips from competing companies without incurring tremendous costs.

"In the past, I worked with proprietary tech, and it was really tough," Keller told Bloomberg. "Open source helps you build a bigger platform. It attracts engineers. And yes, it's a little bit of a passion project."

A spokesperson for Nvidia declined to comment. Representatives for Tenstorrent, Samsung, and Bezos Expeditions did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.