Tenstorrent Closes $1.5 Billion Series E at $6.2 Billion Valuation

Tether Capital announced its participation on 20. oktober 2026, in the $1.5 billion Series E funding round of Tenstorrent, an AI computing company developing high-performance processors, systems and software. Tether said the round values Tenstorrent at $6.2 billion and advances its efforts to support open AI infrastructure, giving more people and businesses the ability to develop and run AI systems independently.

Tether Capital’s announcement followed Tenstorrent’s Series E announcement on 19. oktober 2026, in which the company said it had closed $1.5 billion in Series E funding at a $6.2 billion post-money valuation. Tenstorrent said the round was led by Trace Capital and Innovation X, and said the equity raise will fund volume manufacturing and global commercial expansion as chip designers, sovereign players and inference platforms move to own their AI compute.

Alongside Tether, Tenstorrent listed new and existing investors participating in the round as including Agostinelli Group, ARK Invest, Brett Barna, Cadence Ventures, Eclipse, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Maverick Silicon, Morgan Stanley (MS ), Protagonist, Sandisk, T. Rowe Price (TROW ), Troluce Capital, Virtu Financial (VIRT ) and XTX Markets.

The two announcements identify Tether’s participating entity differently. Tether’s announcement names Tether Capital, while Tenstorrent’s investor list names Tether Investments. Neither announcement disclosed the size of Tether’s commitment.

Tether framed the investment around its view that, as artificial intelligence becomes more widely used, access to the computing power needed to run it remains concentrated among a small number of technology companies. In Tether’s account, developers and businesses often depend on expensive, proprietary hardware and cloud services, limiting their ability to choose how and where their AI systems operate.

“AI should be something people can build, run and control themselves, without having to rely on a handful of companies for the computing power behind it,” said Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether. Ardoino said the Tenstorrent team is developing technology that gives businesses and developers more freedom to choose how they build and deploy AI, and said open computing infrastructure will be essential to making AI accessible to more people.

Tether said the investment builds on QVAC, its open-source AI platform designed to run AI directly on users’ devices, reducing dependence on centralized cloud services and giving individuals greater control over their data and computing resources. According to Tether, supporting Tenstorrent extends its broader work across AI software, robotics and payments to the processors and computing systems underpinning AI.

Use of Proceeds and Product Stack

Tether said Tenstorrent will use the new funding to expand production and deployment of its Galaxy server systems, advance its AI and CPU technology and grow its commercial operations globally. In its own announcement, Tenstorrent said the capital will fund deploying Galaxy servers at scale, continuing to serve open-weight models across large language models and video generation, and advancing the AI and CPU intellectual property it licenses to customers designing their own silicon.

Tenstorrent said it sells AI compute at every level of the stack, from a single card or workstation to racks, superclusters and custom IP. The company said its open-source software stack lets developers run frontier models locally and enterprises deploy models on-premises, and it claims industry-leading latency and throughput.

Tether describes Tenstorrent as a company building an alternative, led by chip architect Jim Keller, developing AI processors, servers and software designed to give customers more control over their computing infrastructure. According to Tether, its hardware ranges from individual workstations to large-scale server systems, it licenses its chip designs to companies developing their own processors, and its open-source software allows developers to run advanced AI models locally. Tether said Tenstorrent’s technology already serves customers developing their own chips, including Samsung and LG, and supports applications ranging from large language models to video generation.

Executive and Investor Statements

Keller, Tenstorrent’s CEO, said the company built one architecture and sells it at every size. He described the future of compute as open, scalable and owned by the people building on it, and said Tenstorrent’s investors believe in that model.

Trace Capital founder Ben Mahdavi said Keller and his team bring decades of hands-on silicon, software and IP experience, and said Trace Capital is excited to partner with Tenstorrent as Galaxy continues to scale.

“Few companies design the chip and the software that runs on it. Tenstorrent does both, and its video generation results beat industry benchmarks ahead of our expectations,” said George Bousis, co-founder and managing partner at Protagonist. Bousis said Protagonist is doubling down in the Series E to back Keller and the team through Tenstorrent’s next phase of growth.