The Zhitong Finance App learned that Amazon (AMZN.US) founder Jeff Bezos (Jeff Bezos) and Samsung joined forces to invest 0.7 billion dollars in Tenstorrent, valuing this ambitious artificial intelligence (AI) chip startup that is challenging NVDA.US (NVDA.US) about 2.6 billion dollars.

Tenstorrent wants to develop a chip in an attempt to break Nvidia's monopoly in the field of artificial intelligence. Tenstorrent founder and semiconductor pioneer Jim Keller said the company received funding in a funding round led by South Korea's AFW Partners and Samsung Securities. Bezos Expeditions, the family office of Bezos, participated in this round of financing with LG Electronics and Fidelity, betting on Keller's strength and the opportunity for artificial intelligence technology to flourish.

The funding will be used to build Tenstorrent's engineering team, invest in its global supply chain, and build a large-scale AI training server to help showcase its technology.

As the field of artificial intelligence increasingly pursues more powerful and economical chips, smaller companies have sprung up to try to grab market share from Nvidia's power-hungry chips. Tenstorrent is one of many companies aiming to provide more affordable solutions for artificial intelligence development. It's built on open source and general-purpose technology, and avoids the use of complex and expensive components, such as Nvidia's favorite high-bandwidth memory (HBM).

Keller said, “If you use HBM, you can't beat Nvidia because Nvidia buys the most HBM and has a cost advantage. But they'll never be able to lower the price by building HBM into their products and card slots.”

Nvidia provides developers with a full suite of proprietary technology, covering everything from chips to interconnects and even data center layouts. Its rivals, such as AMD (AMD.US) and Tenstorrent, aim to enhance interoperability with other technology providers, whether by sharing industry standards or opening designs for others to use.

TenTorrent also supports an alternative logic processor based on open standards RISC-V, which poses a challenge to Arm Holdings (ARM.US).

Keller is famous for his chip design work at Apple, Tesla, and AMD. He said, “In the past, I used proprietary technology, which was really difficult. Open source helps you build a bigger platform. It attracted engineers. Yes, it's a passionate project.”

To date, the new company has signed contracts with customers totaling nearly $0.15 billion, which is insignificant compared to Nvidia's tens of billions of dollars of quarterly data center revenue.

Tenstorrent plans to release a new artificial intelligence processor every two years, Keller said. On the other hand, Nvidia CEO Hwang In-hoon said in June that the company plans to update artificial intelligence chip products once a year.

Tenstorrent said its first chips were manufactured by GFS.US (GFS.US), and the next generation of chips will be manufactured by TSM.US and Samsung Electronics.

Other investors participating in Tenstorrent's funding round include the Canadian Export Development Authority, the Ontario Pension Plan, Hyundai Motor Group, and Baillie Gifford.