Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has reportedly backed a $700 million funding round for Tenstorrent, an AI chip startup, valuing the company at $2.6 billion.

In a bid to compete with Nvidia, Jeff Bezos and Samsung invest $700 million in AI chip startup Tenstorrent

submited by

Style Pass

2024-12-02 18:00:06

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has reportedly backed a $700 million funding round for Tenstorrent, an AI chip startup, valuing the company at $2.6 billion. The investment, led by South Korea’s AFW Partners and Samsung Securities, positions Tenstorrent as a serious competitor to Nvidia which is currently the dominant player in the AI chip market. Other investors include LG Electronics, Fidelity, and Hyundai Motor Group.

Tenstorrent, headquartered in Santa Clara, California, plans to use the funds to expand its engineering team, strengthen its global supply chain, and build AI training servers to showcase its technology. The startup aims to develop chips that offer more cost-effective and power-efficient solutions for AI development, leveraging open-source technology and avoiding the costly high-bandwidth memory (HBM) favored by Nvidia.

“You can’t beat Nvidia if you use HBM, because Nvidia buys the most HBM and has a cost advantage. But they’ll never be able to bring the price down the way HBM is built into their products and their sockets,” said Tenstorrent CEO Jim Keller.