Intel and Qualcomm Circle Tenstorrent as the NVIDIA-Alternative Trade Comes Due
May 19, 2026 – 7:28 am
Image by: Tenstorrent
Bloomberg reports early-stage takeover conversations with the Jim Keller-led AI chip startup, which raised $800m at a $3.2bn valuation last year and counts Bezos Expeditions and Samsung among its backers.
Tenstorrent, the Jim Keller-led AI chip startup, has held early-stage takeover conversations with Intel and Qualcomm, Bloomberg reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the matter. The talks are at the conversational rather than transactional stage, according to the wire’s framing. Tenstorrent declined to comment, and neither Intel nor Qualcomm has confirmed the discussions on the record.
The valuation backdrop matters. Tenstorrent was in talks to raise $800m at a $3.2bn pre-money valuation led by Fidelity Management in November 2025, up from the $693m Series D it closed in December 2024 at a $2.6bn valuation.
Existing investors include Bezos Expeditions, LG Electronics, Baillie Gifford, and the Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan. The company is also reportedly sitting on roughly $150m in customer contracts, including manufacturing arrangements with Samsung and automotive-AI commitments with Hyundai.
The technical positioning is the part that makes the takeover interest legible. Tenstorrent designs RISC-V-based AI accelerators (Ascalon CPU cores and Tensix AI cores) that the company is selling both as packaged silicon and as licensable IP, an unusual hybrid model for a chip startup.
Keller, whose CV runs through Apple’s A-series, Tesla’s autopilot silicon, AMD’s Zen architecture, and Intel’s CPU group, joined as CTO in 2020 and took over as CEO in 2025.
The pitch to the named acquirers is that the alternative to building an NVIDIA rival from scratch is buying the only credible RISC-V-AI platform on the market.
The buyer-side logic differs by name. Intel needs anything that lets it reposition against NVIDIA inside the AI training market, having spent the past two years restructuring its discrete-accelerator strategy after the Gaudi line underperformed against expectations.
Qualcomm is the more interesting buyer, with a smartphone-SoC and Arm-architecture business that has historically not competed in data-centre AI but which would acquire, in Tenstorrent, both a licensable IP block and a credible non-Arm CPU roadmap inside the same transaction.
Bloomberg’s reporting does not specify whether either buyer is exploring a full takeover or a minority strategic investment.
The market context is the wider re-rating of NVIDIA alternatives. NVIDIA has itself committed over $40bn of AI equity in 2026 to lock in long-term GPU supply commitments from named customers; Google’s TPU programme has shown that the alternative-architecture path can produce customer traction at scale; Cerebras has filed to go public on an inference-optimised pitch; and Groq has been raising at structurally rising valuations through 2025.