The Santa Clara, Calif.-headquartered chip startup has held talks with the two semiconductor giants as well as investment banks, sources told Bloomberg. Tenstorrent, Intel and Qualcomm declined to comment to the news outlet. (Bloomberg)

Talking point: Toronto-founded Tenstorrent is one of several upstart chipmakers looking to take a piece of the AI compute market from leader Nvidia. It’s particularly focused on inference, the stage after a model has been trained when it’s used to power chatbots and other generative tools. Last month, Tenstorrent released a package of technology it says will make it easier and cheaper for cloud services and businesses to run their AI tools. The firm relocated from Canada to the U.S. in November 2023, and announced a US$693-million funding round in December 2024. Last year, Qualcomm acquired Alphawave Semi, another Toronto-founded hardware firm. The chip market is frothy right now; Nvidia effectively acquired inference player Groq last December, while aspiring rival Cerebras went public to significant investor demand earlier this month.