Jeff Bezos is betting millions on a Nvidia rival

Billionaire Jeff Bezos is throwing his weight behind a computing company that’s coming for Nvidia’s (NVDA) dominance of the artificial intelligence chip market. Bezos Expeditions, the Amazon (AMZN) founder’s private investment vehicle, was part of a $693 million funding round for Tenstorrent, the company announced Monday. He joined LG Electronics and Fidelity in the round led by South Korean firms Samsung Securities and AFW Partners.

“We are excited by the breadth of investors that believe in our vision,” Keith Witek, the chief operating officer of Tenstorrent, in a statement. “If you look at this group, you see a balance of financial investors and strategic investors, as well as some notable individuals that have conviction in our plans for AI.”

Tenstorrent said it will use the money to “build out open-source AI software stacks, hire developers, expand its global development and design centers, and build systems and clouds for AI developers.” The company has strived to provide more accessible and affordable solutions for companies looking to develop their AI capabilities, putting itself in direct competition with fellow Santa Clara, California-based firm Nvidia. So far, it has signed about $150 million in contracts, Tenstorrent said.

Currently the second-most valuable company in the world behind Apple (AAPL), Nvidia is a Wall Street powerhouse and a behemoth in the AI chip space. Last month, it reported $35.1 billion in revenues for its fiscal third quarter, with 36% of that revenue — or $12.6 billion — coming from only three unnamed customers. Those sales are primarily attributable to Nvidia’s Compute & Networking segment, according to filing.

Although Nvidia will not disclose the customers, its top buyers are likely to include Google (GOOGL) parent Alphabet, Meta (META), Microsoft (MSFT), and Tesla (TSLA) — all of whom are major players in the AI boom.

But smaller companies are struggling to build up their AI capabilities as Big Tech firms corner the market — and power-hungry AI chips remain prohibitively expensive.

That’s where Tenstorrent is hoping to come in. Founder and CEO Jim Keller told Bloomberg that Tenstorrent uses open-source and commonplace technology to provide engineering solutions that put AI in reach for more firms, and skips costly and complex parts, including like high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used by Nvidia.

“You can’t beat Nvidia if you use HBM, because Nvidia buys the most HBM and has a cost advantage,” Keller said. “But they’ll never be able to bring the price down the way HBM is built into their products and their sockets.”

Open-source technology has become increasingly popular amid the AI boom, given its cost effectiveness. Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company’s first open-source, multimodal large language model, Llama 3.2, will be the way forward.

“It’s sort of like the Linux of AI, and we’re seeing closed-source labs react by trying to slash their prices to compete with Llama,” he said at Meta’s annual Connect conference in September.

Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI also made its chatbot, Grok-1, an open-source model.