OAKLAND, California: Canadian AI computer design startup Tenstorrent announced Tuesday that it is collaborating with South Korean consumer electronics company LG Electronics Inc. to build chips that power smart TVs, automotive products and data centers.
Tenstorrent, founded in 2016, designs computers to train and run artificial intelligence models and works on both the software and hardware, CEO Jim Keller said in an interview. Keller is an engineer best known for pioneering chip design at Apple Inc., Tesla Inc., and chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
Keller, an early investor in Tenstorrent, took the helm in 2024. The company, which is already valued at $1 billion according to data firm PitchBook, has yet to disclose any of its customers.
LG will initially use Tenstorrent’s AI chip design to develop its own chips, but the partnership is more strategic, said David Bennett, Tenstorrent’s chief customer officer.
“What we are looking at is also part of the technology that LG has developed. Couldn’t it be something that we either use in our own products or possibly with other future customers.”
Tenstorrent has also developed a processor chip that uses RISC-V, a relatively new open standard chip architecture that is compatible with Arm Ltd.’s Arm architecture. competes. While many chip startups focus on one chip type, Keller said his team is developing both the AI chip and the processor because they need to work closely together to handle rapidly changing AI models.
“We have to take a look at the whole thing. … It’s still early. And it was built on top of the available components,” Keller said of today’s AI and AI hardware landscape.
“In the last five years, people have learned so much about how this works and made real progress. But it doesn’t look like we’re even close to knowing, ‘This is the right way, the best way, or ‘the last.'”
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