Qualcomm in talks to buy AI chip startup Tenstorrent for 8 to 10 billion dollars led by Jim Keller to expand data center AI capabilities
Qualcomm $QCOM is in talks to buy AI chip startup Tenstorrent for $8 to $10 billion, a push to break deeper into the data center and AI training market dominated by Nvidia $NVDA. Tenstorrent, led by veteran chip designer Jim Keller, was valued near $2.6 billion late last year.
Qualcomm $QCOM, best known for the processors inside most Android smartphones, is reported to be in talks to acquire AI chip startup Tenstorrent in a deal worth between $8 billion and $10 billion. The reporting, first published by The Information and picked up by Reuters and Yahoo Finance, describes discussions that are still ongoing and could change in price or collapse entirely. Tenstorrent was founded in 2016 and is led by Jim Keller, a chip designer with a long track record at AMD, Apple, Tesla and Intel. The company builds processors aimed at accelerating the training and inference of AI models, the same workloads that have made Nvidia $NVDA the most valuable chipmaker in the world. A purchase at this level would mark a sharp escalation in Qualcomm's ambitions beyond mobile, where growth has slowed, and into the data center market where the largest AI spending now sits. The reported price is several times Tenstorrent's roughly $2.6 billion valuation from its funding round late last year, a premium that reflects how scarce credible alternatives to Nvidia's hardware have become. Investors responded quickly, with Qualcomm shares rising on the news. For Qualcomm, owning Tenstorrent's architecture and Keller's engineering team would offer a faster route into AI accelerators than building from scratch. Whether the talks produce a deal, and on what terms, remains unsettled.