Tenstorrent Secures $100 Million From Hyundai & Samsung As Jim Keller Challenges NVIDIA’s AI Monopoly

wccftech.com:

Tenstorrent, the Canadian-based AI startup spearheaded by industry veteran, Jim Keller, has secured a fresh round of funding from Hyundai and Samsung as they plan to disrupt NVIDIA's monopoly within the AI space.

The latest funding to Tenstorrent comes from Hyundai Motor Group and Samsung Catalyst Fund (a venture/investment arm of Samsung Electronics). The amount worth $100 million pushes the total funding secured by the company to $334.5 Million which it had also received from other firms such as Fidelity Ventures, Eclipse Ventures, Epiq Capital, and Maverick Capital. The $100 Million funding is broken into $50 Million from Samsung, $30 Million from Hyundai, & $20 Million from KIA. These top automobile manufacturers are backing Tenstorrent to utilize their future AI hardware within a series of next-gen autonomous vehicles.

But the primary goal of the funding is to break NVIDIA's monopoly within the AI space and if there's one person who has the engineering expertise and vision to do so, that's Jim Keller. Jim not only brought beak AMD back in the game with the revolutionary Zen core architecture which he was responsible for, but also worked at Apple and Intel in designing their next-gen core architectures.

Talking to ZDNET, Jim stated that currently, NVIDIA is in such a dominant position that they virtually have a monopoly within the AI segment. They take the major cut of revenue for every AI solution that makes use of their chip infrastructure (both hardware and software) and that needs to change.

"Nvidia has monopoly [profit margins]," said Jim Keller, CEO of AI chip startup Tenstorrent, in an exclusive interview with ZDNET. "If you want to go build a high-performance solution with AI inside of it, Nvidia will command