Starting the AI chip Tentorrent reportedly raised $700 million in its quest to challenge Nvidia.
The investment – from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Samsung – values the company at around $2.6 billion, Bloomberg News reported Monday (December 2).
Tenstorrent plans to use the funding to expand its engineering team, invest in its supply chain, and develop large artificial intelligence (AI) training servers to demonstrate its technology.
As companies increasingly seek power and profitability in AI, smaller companies are looking to provide a more affordable alternative to Nvidia and its more expensive high-bandwidth memory (HBM) components, the report says .
“You can’t beat Nvidia if you use HBM, because Nvidia buys the most HBM and has a cost advantage,” founder of Tenstorrent. Jim Keller told Bloomberg. “But they will never be able to drive down prices the way HBM is integrated into their products and their outlets.”
The report notes that while Nvidia offers developers a suite of proprietary technologies designed to work better because they were created together, companies like Tenstorrent are aiming for greater interoperability with other technology providers.
Additionally, Tenstorren is also pushing for an alternative type of logic processor based on an open standard known as RISC-V, a potential challenge for Arm, Bloomberg added.
“In the past, I worked with proprietary technologies and it was really difficult,” said Keller, a veteran of Apple, Tesla and AMD. “Open source helps you build a bigger platform. This attracts engineers. And yes, it’s a bit of a passion project.
He added that Tenstorrent aims to introduce a new AI processor every two years. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in June that his company update your chips every year.
Huang discussed the future of his company last month after posting 94% year-over-year revenue growth for the third trimester.
“Many AI services operate 24/7, just like any factory,” Huang said during an earnings conference call. “We’re going to see this new type of system come online. And I call this (the company’s data centers) an AI factory because that’s really close to what it is. It’s not like the data centers of the past.
“And these fundamental trends are really just beginning,” he added. “We hope that this growth, modernization and creation of a new industry will continue for several years.”
