Samsung Becomes Tenstorrent's Chip Manufacturer, Canadian Artificial Intelligence Startup

JAKARTA - Samsung's contract chip manufacturing unit has obtained a new customer in the form of a Canadian startup called Tenstorrent. This was reported by the South Korean company announcing on Monday, October 2.

Tenstorrent is one of a number of startups trying to challenge Nvidia's dominance in the artificial intelligence (AI) chip market. The company manufactures chips and intellectual properties for data centers, but also works to supply other markets such as automotive.

As part of the deal, Tenstorrent plans to use one of Samsung's most advanced manufacturing processes, known as 4nm, to manufacture the chips. The Tenstorrent product produced by Samsung is a chipset, designed to sit alongside other chipslets in one package.

The two companies did not disclose the value of this deal or the number of chips to be produced.

Several Tenstorrent chips were built with technology known as RISC-V, which is an open source semiconductor architecture that competes with Arm and x86 used by Intel and Advanced Micron Devices (AMD).

The chips to be produced by Samsung for Tenstorrent are called Quasar, and are not based on RISC-V technology.

"The focus of Tenstorrent is to develop high-performance computing and provide these solutions to customers around the world," Tenstorrent CEO Jim Keller said in a statement.

The chip deal follows Samsung's investment in Tenstorrent last August as part of a $100 million fundraising which also involved Hyundai Motor Co and other parties.