Jeff Bezos joins Samsung in $700 million bet on AI chip startup to challenge Nvidia

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has teamed up with Samsung in a $700 million investment in Tenstorrent, an AI chip startup aiming to challenge Nvidia's dominance in the artificial intelligence market.

The funding round, led by South Korea’s AFW Partners and Samsung Securities, values the company at approximately $2.6 billion, News.Az reports, citing Bloomberg.

Tenstorrent, which hopes to create a chip to try and break Nvidia’s stranglehold on the AI business, raised capital in a funding round led by South Korea’s AFW Partners and Samsung Securities, founder and semiconductor pioneer Jim Keller said in an interview. Bezos Expeditions joined LG Electronics Inc. and Fidelity in that financing, betting on Keller’s pedigree and the booming opportunity in artificial intelligence tech.

The money will be used to build out Tenstorrent’s engineering team, invest in its global supply chain and build large artificial intelligence training servers to help demonstrate its technology.

As the quest for more power and cost efficiency in AI ramps up, smaller companies are sprouting up trying to snatch market share from Nvidia’s power-hungry chips. Tenstorrent, an Nvidia neighbor in Santa Clara, California, is one of many now engineering solutions aimed at delivering a more affordable path to AI development. That’s built on open-source and commonplace technology, avoiding complex and pricey components like the high-bandwidth memory Nvidia favors.

Nvidia offers developers a full suite of proprietary technology, covering everything from the chips to the interconnects and even data center layouts, with the promise of all parts working better because they were designed in concert. Companies like rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Tenstorrent are instead aiming for greater interoperability with other technology providers, whether through shared industry standards or opening their designs for others to use.

Tenstorrent is also a proponent of an alternative kind of logic processor based on an open standard called RISC-V, which poses a challenge to Arm Holdings Plc. Keller, known for his silicon design work at Apple Inc., Tesla Inc. and AMD, is an advocate.

Much like RISC-V and Japanese partner Rapidus Corp., Tenstorrent still has a lot to prove. To date, the nascent company has signed contracts with customers totaling nearly $150 million, which pales in comparison to Nvidia’s tens of billions of dollars of datacenter revenue each quarter.

Tenstorrent plans to release a new AI processor at a cadence of every two years, Keller said. Nvidia, on the other hand, intends to refresh its AI chip offerings on an annual cycle, its boss Jensen Huang said in June.

News.Az