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.
Tenstorrent Continues To Rack Up Funding As Jim Keller Eyes NVIDIA's AI Push
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 most of the margin in the product. The problem with the winner-take-all strategy is it generates an economic environment where people really want an alternative."
"You can't give 60% gross margin to Nvidia for standard product, to be honest, and they're looking for options."
Jim Keller, Tenstorrent CEO (via ZDNET)
In a recent conference in Tokyo, Japan, Jim highlighted that he is building RISC-V-based AI CPUs which will compete with NVIDIA's AI GPUs. The fundamental thought is that AI isn't always going to be about CUDA or PyTorch and while GPUs might be the best solution for AI today, there might be something else in the future that offers better AI performance and capabilities. AMD ROCm also recently made it easier to port CUDA code and applications for developers while Tenstorrent is developing its own open-source BUDA framework which we talked about here.
"I don't believe this -- GPUs running CUDA and PyTorch -- is the end game for AI at all. "When the aliens land, I don't think they'll be asking us, 'Did we invent CUDA?' " quipped Keller, referring to Nvidia's software platform for running those neural networks.
"While GPUs have success today, they're not the obvious best answer, they're more like the good-enough answer that was available,"
"We decided to build a RISC-V processor to be a general-purpose computing companion to the AI processor because general-purpose computing and AI are gonna work together, and they need to be tightly embedded."
To do so, "I hired some of the best designers from AMD, Apple, and Nvidia," said Keller, who said he's into "the team adventure." "We have a great CPU team; I'm really, really excited about it."
Jim Keller, Tenstorrent CEO (via ZDNET)
But that doesn't mean that Jim Keller doesn't appreciate NVIDIA's and Jensen's decision to focus on the software stack for AI and HPC early on which helped push the company to new heights when AI saw its iPhone moment happen.
Jim Keller sees the current wave of AI as a "War of Computation" with multiple tech giants and new startups trying to offer the best solution to meet the accelerated demand. Whoever comes on top is something that only time will tell since AI is still in its infancy and if it truly is what would drive the next generation of computing, then NVIDIA just had the lucky start. AMD and Intel are working on their respective AI families while Tenstorrent also has laid out a roadmap of their future tech that spans several years.
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