Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos joined Samsung in a $700 million bet on Tenstorrent, valuing the AI chip startup with ambitions of taking on Nvidia Corp. at about $2.6 billion. Tenstorrent, which hopes to create a chip to try and break Nvidia’s stranglehold on the AI business, raised capital in a funding round led by South Korea’s AFW Partners and Samsung Securities, founder and semiconductor pioneer Jim Keller said in an interview. Bezos Expeditions joined LG Electronics Inc. and Fidelity in that financing, betting on Keller’s pedigree and the booming opportunity in artificial intelligence tech. The money will be used to build out Tenstorrent’s engineering team, invest in its global supply chain and build large artificial intelligence training servers to help demonstrate its technology. As the quest for more power and cost efficiency in AI ramps up, smaller companies are sprouting up trying to snatch market share from Nvidia’s power-hungry chips. Tenstorrent, an Nvidia neighbor in Santa Clara, California, is one of many now engineering solutions aimed at delivering a more affordable path to AI development. That’s built on open-source and commonplace technology, avoiding complex and pricey components like the high-bandwidth memory Nvidia favors.

Full report : Toronto-based AI chip designer Tenstorrent raised a $700 million Series D from Jeff Bezos, Samsung, and more at a ~$2.6 billion valuation and claims nearly $150 million in contracts.