In a recent interview with the media, Jim Keller, the father of the Zen architecture and CEO of Tenstorrent, publicly stated his position for the first time on the rumors that the company was being purchased by Intel and Qualcomm.He did not directly comment on the acquisition rumors themselves, but confirmed that he had met with the CEOs of the two companies and hoped to reach a big deal.
Previous reports stated that Qualcomm was negotiating to acquire Tenstorrent for US$8 billion to US$10 billion, and Intel also expressed early interest in the acquisition.
Jim Keller said in the interview that he hopes to export Tenstorrent’s RISC-V CPU IP license to the two giants.Additionally, a hyperscale data center operator has approached Tenstorrent about its AI IP for use in small chips.
Jim Keller also expressed his views on Cerebras' recent IPO. He said he is not worried about Cerebras' listing, but thinks it will be helpful because Tenstorrent will surpass them in all aspects.
Previously, Cerebras' WSE-CS3 wafer-level hardware achieved an inference performance of close to 1,000 tokens per second on the Kimi K2.6 (1T) model, but Jim Keller said that large-scale deployment of BlackHole servers can not only easily surpass it, but the total system cost is much lower than its opponents.
Tenstorrent’s BlackHole Galaxy server is its backbone. The server starts at $110,000 and contains 32 Blackhole chips. The total cost of ownership is only one-fifth of NVIDIA’s similar AI server solutions.
Jim Keller also revealed that Tenstorrent is planning an IPO, and investors are optimistic about it. In addition, the company is currently preparing 1,000 Galaxy servers for production, half of which have been pre-ordered by customers.
