Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos and Samsung have invested in Tenstorrent, a startup aiming to challenge Nvidia’s dominance in the AI chip market.
According to Bloomberg, the $700 million funding round, which values Tenstorrent at $2.6 billion, also drew support from LG Electronics, Fidelity, and other backers.
Tenstorrent, led by chip industry veteran Jim Keller, plans to use the funds to expand its engineering team, strengthen its supply chain, and develop AI training servers showcasing its technology.
The company focuses on creating chips that offer a cost-efficient alternative to Nvidia’s expensive, proprietary solutions.
Instead of relying on high-bandwidth memory (HBM), a costly component Nvidia uses, Tenstorrent leverages open-source designs to attract developers and partners.
The startup has embraced RISC-V, an open-standard processor architecture, as a foundation for its chips, challenging proprietary designs like those from Arm Holdings.