(Reuters) – Samsung’s contract chip manufacturing arm has announced a new partnership with Canadian startup Tenstorrent to produce artificial intelligence (AI) chips. Tenstorrent is one of several startups seeking to challenge Nvidia’s dominance in the AI chip market. While the company currently focuses on producing chips and intellectual property for data centers, it is also exploring other markets such as automotive.
Under the agreement, Tenstorrent will leverage Samsung’s advanced 4nm manufacturing process to produce the chips. The specific Tenstorrent product to be manufactured by Samsung is a chiplet intended to be used alongside other chiplets within a single package. Financial details and the quantity of chips to be produced were not disclosed by either company.
Notably, some of Tenstorrent’s chips are built with RISC-V technology, an open-source semiconductor architecture that competes with Arm and x86. The chip Samsung will manufacture for Tenstorrent, named Quasar, is not based on RISC-V technology.
Tenstorrent CEO Jim Keller expressed the company’s dedication to delivering high-performance compute solutions globally. This chip deal follows Samsung’s investment in Tenstorrent as part of a $100 million capital raise in August, which included Hyundai Motor Co and other investors.
Before the August funding round, Tenstorrent had already raised $234.5 million and achieved a valuation of $1 billion.
(Reporting by Max A. Cherney in San Francisco; Editing by Leslie Adler)
Credit: The Star : Tech Feed
