Canadian-founded, United States (US)-based artificial intelligence (AI) hardware company Tenstorrent has acquired Blue Cheetah Analog Design, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based startup designing analog mixed-signal chips, for an undisclosed amount.
Acquisition follows Tenstorrent’s nearly $700-million USD Series D round at a $2.6-billion valuation this past winter.
Tenstorrent said the startup brings a wealth of expertise in analog mixed-signal tech that will help Tenstorrent develop the chiplets it’s planning to produce. Chiplets are smaller, specialized semiconductor dies that can be combined to create a traditional system-on-chip design, while analog mixed-signal chips have both analog and digital circuits on a single semiconductor die. A die is a small block of semiconductor material that a circuit is made on.
Tenstorrent said that advanced interconnects and other analog and mixed-signal components like Blue Cheetah’s have been critical to the performance and efficiency of AI systems, and that acquiring Blue Cheetah brings the capabilities in-house to Tenstorrent. Tenstorrent said the deal contributes to its vision of “creating an open chiplet ecosystem, with open interconnects optimized for each specific chiplet socket.”
Tenstorrent is acquiring Blue Cheetah after licensing its intellectual property (IP) for AI and RISC-V (an open-source processor architecture) solutions last year.
“As a customer and partner, Tenstorrent collaborated closely with Blue Cheetah to realize the full benefits of our BlueLynx technology in their chiplet products,” Blue Cheetah CEO Elad Alon said in a statement. “The Blue Cheetah team looks forward to amplifying our impact by joining with Tenstorrent to provide both leading IP and chiplets/chiplet ecosystems critical to the continued progression of AI.”
The acquisition follows the chipmaker securing a nearly $700-million USD Series D round at a $2.6-billion valuation this past winter, shortly after it quietly relocated its headquarters from Toronto to Santa Clara, Calif.
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Tenstorrent vice-president of investor relations and corporate communications, Bob Grim, told BetaKit following the round that the company went stateside because one of its larger investors had a cap on how large its stake in Tenstorrent could be if it was based outside of the US. Grim added that relocating to the US is a common move ahead of eventual initial public offerings (IPOs) on the Nasdaq or New York Stock Exchange.
Tenstorrent is now just one of many Canadian AI hardware companies that have moved south of the border. Key competitor Nvidia acquired Canadian AI model optimizer CentML last month, while AMD acqui-hired AI chipmaker Untether AI last month.
The phenomenon was a topic of conversation during Toronto Tech Week, where Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez urged Canadian founders to not sell out or relocate to the US, calling acquisition “failure.” Canada’s AI Minister Evan Solomon also spoke on the importance of retaining homegrown IP at a Toronto Tech Week event, warning that Canada might become the “farm system to other countries.”
Tenstorrent has not completely left Canada, retaining its office in Toronto, where Grim said the company employed 140 people as of November 2024.
Feature image courtesy Tenstorrent.