By Hamza Faisal
Two of America's biggest chipmakers have landed on the same target — and the asking price has roughly doubled in five months.
Intel and Qualcomm are both reported to be bidding for Tenstorrent, the AI chip startup run by legendary chip architect Jim Keller, in a deal that could value the Santa Clara company at as much as $10 billion, according to The Information (since confirmed by Reuters) and The Inference this week.
Bloomberg first reported back in May that Intel was in early talks at $5 billion or more, sending Intel shares up as much as 8% intraday. Since then the number has escalated: The Information reports Qualcomm is now in discussions valuing Tenstorrent between $8 billion and $10 billion, possibly in cash and stock. No deal has closed, and people familiar with the talks caution they could still fall apart. Tenstorrent declined to comment; Qualcomm said it doesn't comment on rumors.
Why everyone wants Jim Keller's chips
Founded in 2016, Tenstorrent builds AI accelerators and open RISC-V processor designs aimed squarely at Nvidia's dominance of AI compute. Nvidia's AI silicon generates margins above 70 percent — a credible cost break would compress them hard.
There is fresh ammunition. On October 2, voice-AI lab Smallest.ai put its Lightning V2 speech model on Tenstorrent's Galaxy Blackhole servers with no upfront commitment. Its engineering paper claims the same workload runs for roughly a quarter of the accelerator cost of an Nvidia L40S — about $100,000 of L40S cards versus $27,000 of Tenstorrent P100s for 550 concurrent requests. The same day in Japan, Tokyo firms Fixstars and Macnica tuned the open-weight gpt-oss-120b model on a Tenstorrent workstation, cutting per-token generation time 31 percent.
The catch: the claims are vendor-published and unverified; comprehensive independent benchmarks on production workloads do not yet exist. Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon warns a buyer may largely be acquiring Keller himself — the architect behind AMD's Zen and Apple's A-series, who has a record of leaving big companies within a few years.
Qualcomm's data-center homecoming
For Qualcomm, Tenstorrent would be the biggest step yet in its return to the data center. The company withdrew from data-center chips in 2018, but CEO Cristiano Amon teased a comeback in August 2025. Qualcomm has since acquired Alphawave Semi, Arduino, Edge Impulse and Foundries.io, and in June nearly closed a $4 billion all-stock deal for AI software startup Modular.
The prize is bigger than one startup: a RISC-V-based stack that could rival Nvidia's CUDA-locked ecosystem — silicon to pair with Qualcomm's growing software portfolio, and a credible alternative roadmap for Intel as it tries to matter in AI again.
The $10 billion question
Can the price-performance claims survive independent verification? That is the whole deal. But bidders now have something previous acquirers didn't: Galaxy Blackhole reached general availability in April, so anyone can run real workloads and read the invoice before signing.
Whether Intel or Qualcomm wins — or the dual-track process ends in a funding round instead — the message is the same. The industry's most valuable architects are no longer trying to beat Nvidia at its own game. They are trying to change the game entirely, and $10 billion is the entry fee.
By Hamza Faisal
