Tether joins Tenstorrent’s $1.5B round as AI investments grow

Tether has joined Tenstorrent's $1.5 billion Series E funding round at a $6.2 billion valuation, adding an AI hardware investment to its work on software and automated payments.

Summary

• Tether joined Tenstorrent's $1.5 billion funding round at a $6.2 billion valuation.
• Tenstorrent plans to fund Galaxy server production, chip development and global expansion.
• Neither company disclosed Tether's investment amount or ownership stake.
• Tether's other recent AI projects include AIsa payments and offline speech recognition.

Tether Capital announced its participation on Oct. 20, just a day after Tenstorrent disclosed it had completed its financing round. Neither company said how much Tether invested, how much of Tenstorrent it owns, or how it will record the investment in its accounts.

In its announcement, Tether described its El Salvador-based investment arm as a business that deploys company profits and excess reserves. It did not identify which funds paid for the Tenstorrent stake or place the investment within a specific balance-sheet category.

Tether joins a completed Tenstorrent equity round

In its Oct. 19 statement, Tenstorrent identifies Trace Capital and Innovation X as the round's leaders. Its investor list names Tether Investments, while Tether's own announcement uses Tether Capital.

Among the other participants, the chipmaker named are ARK Invest, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Morgan Stanley, Sandisk, T. Rowe Price, Eclipse and XTX Markets. The firm describes the transaction as an equity raise and gives the $6.2 billion figure as its post-money valuation.

Reuters reported the completed financing round on Oct. 19 and said the company's previous round raised more than $693 million in December 2024 at a $2 billion pre-money valuation.

Led by Jim Keller, Tenstorrent plans to spend the proceeds on deploying Galaxy servers, developing AI and CPU designs, and expanding commercial operations. Its announcement noted the servers support open-weight language models and video generation.

Among the products the company sells are equipment ranging from individual cards and workstations to racks and superclusters. Chip designers can also license its TT-Ascalon CPU technology and Tensix AI cores, with Samsung and LG among the customers named in its release.

Ardoino backs locally controlled AI computing

Explaining the investment, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said AI should be something people can "build, run and control themselves"

It ties the investment to Tether's preference for AI systems that developers and businesses can operate independently. Tether says reliance on proprietary hardware and cloud providers limits users' choices over where their systems run.

Meanwhile, Tenstorrent describes its software stack as open source and says customers can run models locally or deploy them within their own facilities. Its funding announcement did not provide an independent comparison of the cost of these deployments against competing services.

Keller described the company's product approach in the financing announcement:

"We built one architecture and sell it at every size."

Keller previously led Tesla's work on a self-driving chip and held chip-design roles at Apple and AMD. Tenstorrent is based in Santa Clara, California.

Tether's disclosed reserve figures predate the investment

crypto.news previously reported that Tether disclosed $1.5 billion in profit from Q2 operations, with U.S. Treasury investments and repo operations supporting its earnings.

In its July 31 release, the issuer reported assets of $187.75 billion against liabilities of $183.64 billion as of June 30. Its stated excess reserve buffer was $4.11 billion, and it said most reserves remained in U.S. government-backed instruments and short-term liquidity facilities.

It also revealed reducing secured lending exposure by $2.38 billion during the quarter and adding 14 tons of physical gold. Its reported gold holdings exceeded 146 tons.

On Aug. 13, Tether announced an unqualified KPMG audit opinion covering its 2025 financial statements. According to the company, the audited accounts showed reserves exceeding liabilities by $6.814 billion at Dec. 31, 2025.

Tether said the audit examined transactions, ownership records, valuations, counterparties, and supporting documents. The annual accounts cover a period before the Tenstorrent financing, while the June reserve figures describe a separate reporting date.

AI spending includes agent payments and speech software

Before the chip investment, Tether and HIVEN joined a seed extension for AIsa, whose Oct. 15 announcement placed cumulative funding above $9 million.

AIsa says its platform lets enterprise AI agents obtain paid data, models, software and other services through one interface. Its controls include permissions, budgets, spending limits, approval steps and transaction records.

The firm says it has started enterprise pilots covering financial intelligence, market research, supply-chain management and commerce. Neither participant's individual investment was disclosed in the announcements.

Tether's recent software releases include an offline speech recognition model, QVAC TranscribePsy, announced on Oct. 14. The 254-million-parameter software processes audio on devices without uploading recordings to cloud servers.

In company evaluations, TranscribePsy recorded a 6.58% word error rate on Multilingual LibriSpeech and 21.56% on Common Voice.

The release includes mobile and laptop configurations, with versions built for Apple's Neural Engine and the parakeet.cpp engine. Tether published model weights and evaluation configurations, and identified smart glasses and humanoid robots among the intended applications.