Qualcomm is in talks to acquire Tenstorrent, the AI chip startup led by veteran processor architect Jim Keller, for between $8 billion and $10 billion, according to reporting first surfaced by The Information and since corroborated by multiple outlets. Neither company has confirmed the discussions, and no deal has been finalized.
Tenstorrent designs AI accelerators built on RISC-V, an open and royalty-free instruction-set architecture that competes with the proprietary designs licensed by Arm and the CUDA-bound chips that have made Nvidia the dominant supplier of AI hardware. The startup’s pitch is that an open standard can undercut the incumbents on cost and lock-in.
Keller is among the most decorated chip architects of his generation, with foundational work on Apple’s mobile processors, AMD’s Zen cores, and Tesla’s self-driving silicon. His presence has made Tenstorrent a magnet for talent and investment betting that RISC-V can carve out a place in data-center AI.
The company’s flagship Galaxy Blackhole platform, launched earlier this year, packs 32 accelerators—each with 768 RISC-V cores—into a single 6U server enclosure, a design aimed at the large-scale training and inference workloads where Nvidia’s GPUs currently dominate.
For Qualcomm, the deal would mark a decisive move beyond the smartphone and edge-device markets it has long led. Acquiring a full RISC-V AI accelerator stack would give the company a foothold in the data center, the most lucrative and fastest-growing segment of the chip industry, and a hedge against its dependence on a maturing mobile business.
It would also be Qualcomm’s second RISC-V acquisition in months, following its purchase of Ventana Micro Systems in December. Together the deals would signal a deliberate bet that open silicon, not just licensed Arm cores, is where Qualcomm can differentiate itself as the industry races to diversify away from Nvidia.
The price tag reflects how quickly AI hardware valuations have climbed. As recently as last year, Tenstorrent was raising roughly $800 million at a $3.2 billion valuation; a sale at up to $10 billion would represent a two-and-a-half- to threefold jump in about 12 months, underscoring the premium buyers are placing on credible alternatives to Nvidia.
Qualcomm is not the only suitor. Intel has also expressed interest in Tenstorrent, creating the prospect of a bidding contest for one of the few independent AI-chip firms with a working data-center product and a marquee design team—one whose outcome could shape how much room open architectures get in the next phase of the AI buildout.