Tenstorrent

Tenstorrent is a North American artificial intelligence hardware and intellectual property company that designs processors for AI training and inference on the basis of the open-standard RISC-V instruction set architecture. Led since January 2023 by veteran chip designer Jim Keller — architect of AMD's K7/K8 and Zen CPUs, Apple's A4 and A5, and Tesla's first full self-driving chip — the company builds AI accelerators branded Grayskull, Wormhole and Blackhole, high-performance RISC-V CPUs marketed as Ascalon, and Galaxy multi-chip servers, all paired with a fully open-source software stack.^[1][2]

Architecture

Tenstorrent's processors are built around a tile called a Tensix core, conceptually closer to a parallel many-core processor than to a GPU streaming multiprocessor. Each tile bundles a dense matrix unit for tensor maths, a vector unit for element-wise work, roughly 1.5 MB of local SRAM, two network-on-chip (NoC) interfaces, and five small RISC-V control cores — nicknamed "baby" RISC-V cores — that handle instruction issue, data movement and packing between formats.^[1][3] Tensix cores operate natively on 32×32 tiles of data and are arranged in a two-dimensional mesh.

The mesh does not stop at the die. Wormhole, announced in 2021 and generally available from 2024, carries sixteen 100 Gbps Ethernet ports on the chip itself; Blackhole, announced in August 2024 and launched at Tenstorrent's Dev Day in April 2025, carries ten 400 Gbps ports. Software can therefore treat a cluster of chips as one large fabric, cabled with standard data-centre optics instead of proprietary interconnects.^[2][3] Manufacturing choices emphasise cost: Grayskull and Wormhole were built on GlobalFoundries' 12 nm process, Blackhole on TSMC's 6 nm, and the parts use GDDR6 memory rather than the expensive high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used by NVIDIA accelerators.^[2][4]

Business and funding

Tenstorrent raised a US$693 million Series D in December 2024 at a $2 billion pre-money valuation, co-led by Samsung Securities and AFW Partners with Fidelity, Bezos Expeditions, LG Electronics and Hyundai Motor Group participating; total funding exceeds $1 billion.^[5] It operates three revenue streams: accelerator cards and Galaxy systems, licensable IP (Ascalon CPUs, Tensix cores and Open Chiplet Architecture blocks), and a developer cloud. Investors with industrial interests — Samsung, Hyundai, LG — reflect demand for an alternative supplier to NVIDIA.^[2][6]

Its competitive pitch is explicitly contrarian: where NVIDIA stacks HBM behind large monolithic dies and locks developers into CUDA, Tenstorrent ships modest-die GDDR6 accelerators connected by ordinary Ethernet, exposes the underlying cores to developers and publishes its compilers as open source. Analysts note the corresponding weakness — the software stack is younger than CUDA's, with model support and documentation still maturing for the newest generation.^[7]

>See Also

• NVIDIA
• AMD
• RISC-V
• Cerebras Systems
• Groq
• Penang Semiconductor and AI Ecosystem
• GPU Cluster