随着人工智能领域日益追逐更强大、更经济的芯片，规模较小的公司如雨后春笋般涌现，试图从英伟达的耗电芯片手中抢夺市场份额。Tenstorrent是众多旨在为人工智能开发提供更经济实惠解决方案的公司之一。它建立在开源和通用技术的基础上，避免使用复杂和昂贵的组件，比如英伟达青睐的高带宽内存(HBM)。$Amazon (AMZN.US)$Founder Jeff Bezos partnered with Samsung to invest $0.7 billion in Tenstorrent, a ambitious challenger $NVIDIA (NVDA.US)$of the artificial intelligence (AI) chip startup company, with an estimated valuation of around $2.6 billion.
Tenstorrent hopes to develop a chip that seeks to break nvidia's monopoly in the field of artificial intelligence. The founder of Tenstorrent and semiconductor pioneer Jim Keller stated that the company secured funding in a financing round led by south korea's AFW Partners and Samsung Securities. Bezos' family office, Bezos Expeditions, participated in this round of financing along with LG Electronics and Fidelity, betting on Keller's capabilities and the opportunities in the booming ai technology.
The funds will be used to build Tenstorrent's engineering team, invest in its global supply chain, and establish large AI training servers to help showcase its technology.
As the artificial intelligence field increasingly pursues more powerful and cost-effective chips, smaller companies are emerging rapidly, seeking to capture market share from nvidia's power-hungry chips. Tenstorrent is one of the many companies aiming to provide more affordable solutions for AI development. It is built on open-source and universal technology, avoiding complex and expensive components such as the high bandwidth memory (HBM) favored by nvidia.
Keller stated, "If you use HBM, you cannot beat nvidia because nvidia buys the most HBM and has a cost advantage. But they can never lower prices the way HBM is built into their products and slots."
nvidia provides developers with a complete set of proprietary technologies that cover all aspects from chips to interconnects and even datacenter layouts. Its competitors $Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.US)$ and Tenstorrent and other companies aim to strengthen interoperability with other technology providers, whether through sharing industry standards or open design for others to use.
Tenstorrent also supports an alternative logic processor based on the open standard RISC-V, posing a challenge.$Arm Holdings (ARM.US)$constitutes a challenge.
Keller due to his contributions at apple,$Tesla (TSLA.US)$Renowned for their chip design work with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). He said: "In the past, I used proprietary technology, which was really difficult. Open source can help you build a larger platform. It attracts engineers. Yes, this is a passionate project."
So far, the new company has signed contracts worth nearly $0.15 billion with customers, which seems trivial compared to nvidia's hundreds of billions of dollars in datacenter revenue every quarter.
Keller stated that Tenstorrent plans to release a new ai processor every two years. On the other hand, nvidia CEO Jensen Huang mentioned in June that the company plans to update its ai chip products once a year.
Tenstorrent stated that its initial chips are made by Tai Intel Corp. $GlobalFoundries (GFS.US)$ Tai Intel Corp will manufacture the next generation of chips.$Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM.US)$and Samsung Electronics.
Other investors participating in this round of financing for Tenstorrent include the Canadian Export Development Agency, the Ontario Retirement Insurance Plan, Hyundai Motor Group, and Baillie Gifford.
Editor/new
