TensorWave raises $350M as AMD funds its Nvidia rival to break AI chip monopoly

TensorWave raises $350M as AMD funds its Nvidia rival

The Las Vegas startup runs its data centres entirely on AMD chips. Its backer, AMD, just helped quadruple its valuation to $1.55bn. TensorWave, a cloud provider that runs its AI data centres on AMD chips rather than Nvidia's, has raised $350M in a Series B round led by AMD and the hedge fund Magnetar Capital. The deal values the Las Vegas startup at $1.55bn. That is nearly four times the roughly $400M valuation it carried a year ago. Founded in 2023, TensorWave positions itself as an alternative to Nvidia, whose GPUs dominate AI infrastructure. "We were created to restore competition to the market," chief executive Darrick Horton said. The new capital will fund more data-centre capacity and more chips. TensorWave has already deployed a training cluster of around 8,000 AMD Instinct MI325X accelerators, and the round follows a $100M Series A, co-led by the same backers, in May 2025. AMD is funding its own customer The notable part is who is paying. AMD is both TensorWave's chip supplier and now a lead investor, using its balance sheet to build out a buyer for its accelerators and a counterweight to Nvidia. It is the same playbook Nvidia has run from the other side, pouring more than $40bn into AI equity bets this year, including $2bn into Nebius. TensorWave is wading into a crowded and capital-hungry market. The 'neoclouds' renting out AI compute, led by CoreWeave and Nebius, have signed multibillion-dollar deals but lean almost entirely on Nvidia hardware. An AMD-only cloud is a bet that customers want a second source badly enough to switch. The risk is the same one facing every neocloud: these are debt-and-equity-fuelled buildouts priced on AI demand staying vertical. AMD's backing gives TensorWave cheaper access to chips and a marquee name, but a $1.55bn tag on a three-year-old infrastructure firm assumes the compute crunch, and AMD's share of it, keeps growing.

Data center infrastructure startup TensorWave raises $350M to help break Nvidia's AI chip monopoly

Data center infrastructure startup TensorWave raises $350M to help break Nvidia's AI chip monopoly Cloud-based artificial intelligence infrastructure startup TensorWave Inc. said today it has closed on a bumper $350 million Series B funding round as it strives to meet demand for an alternative to Nvidia Corp.'s graphics processing units. The round was co-led by Magnetar and AMD Ventures, the venture capital arm of the chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Maverick Silicon, Nexus Venture Partners and Western Frontier also participated in the round, which brings TensorWave's valuation to $1.55 billion. The startup is notable for its refusal to have anything to do with Nvidia. It provides access to specialized, high-performance cloud infrastructure such as AI accelerators, renting this to customers who need resources for both training and inference. But uniquely, it relies exclusively on chips and software made by AMD. TensorWave is quite the outlier, because virtually everyone in the AI industry is scrambling to get their hands made on Nvidia's GPUs. Nvidia is the world's top chipmaker for a very good reason - its GPUs are widely viewed as the most effective for running AI workloads. But TensorWave's chief executive Darrick Horton begs to differ. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, he said he purposely avoids buying Nvidia's hardware or any of its other products. That's because he thinks that the company has too much influence over the AI infrastructure market, and believes that's a bad thing for the health of the industry. "We wanted to figure out how we can solve problems for customers and restore competition to the market," Horton explained. "I don't like buying things from monopolies. You don't have a lot of leverage." Las Vegas-based TensorWave was founded in 2023, during the early days of the AI boom, at a time when Nvidia had become "a monopoly by default," due to its status as the world's largest supplier of GPUs. Back then, Horton said customers were already eager to diversify into other AI chip suppliers, and that demand has only increased since then. TensorWave has expanded rapidly in the last three years, and it currently has three operational data centers stacked with AMD's alternative GPUs. Its facilities are located in Arizona, Florida and Pennsylvania, and each one has 10,000 of AMD's Instinct processors and delivers computing capacity that's equivalent to around 14 megawatts of electricity. It's but a drop in the ocean compared to the massive amounts of compute used by companies like OpenAI Group PBC, Anthropic PBC and Google LLC. That's why TensorWave needs more money, so it can expand. Besides its own data centers, it also leases space from other operators and fills them with AMD's chips and other equipment. It has signed leases for 500 megawatts of capacity, but most of those data centers haven't yet come online. Horton said he wants to increase that number to two gigawatts in the next year, and will use the funds from today's round to invest in the chips, power-supply equipment and other gear needed to do that. While building out its capacity, TensorWave has become a key partner of AMD's, helping the chipmaker to improve its custom software platform ROCm. It's important work, because a lot of companies have complained that ROCm is harder to use and buggier than Nvidia's CUDA platform. However, Horton said that his company has helped Nvidia to improve the software so much that these days, "it's pretty much plug-and-play." As a result, AMD hopes that it can increase its presence in the market for AI inference, or workloads where trained AI models respond to queries. The chipmaker has positioned its GPUs as a more efficient alternative to Nvidia's hardware for inference. TensorWave and AMD aren't the only companies trying to provide enterprises with an alternative to Nvidia's chips. Another major rival is Cerebras Systems Inc., which is known for its dinner plate-sized chips that also target inference and went public last month.

AMD's Instinct MI355X Snags a $350 Million Customer as TensorWave Doubles Down Ahead of the MI455X vs Vera Rubin Showdown

TensorWave has announced a new round of investments towards the procurement of AMD's AI solutions to address its growing compute requirements. TensorWave Goes After AMD's Instinct MI355X GPUs With A $350M Investment Towards Its Series B For Rapid AI Compute Expansion AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs are seeing interest from AI firms such as TensorWave, who are raising funds to deploy additional AI capacity using these accelerators. In its announcement, TensorWave says that its new compute deployments are specifically targeting memory-intensive workloads such as LLM training, high-throughput inference, and generative AI applications. With its latest deployments, TensorWave will provide a robust alternative to capacity-constrained and vertically integrated GPU supply chains. The company states that it is already seeing adoption at various AI firms such as Fireworks AI and Luma AI, which are leveraging the compute capabilities of its AMD-based AI infrastructure to power large-scale generative AI workloads and production inference systems. "The next phase of AI will be defined by who can access enough compute to move from experimentation to production," said Darrick Horton, CEO and co-founder of TensorWave. "As models grow larger and workloads become more demanding, enterprises need infrastructure with the memory capacity, performance and flexibility to scale without being locked into a single ecosystem. This investment allows TensorWave to bring AMD Instinct MI355X GPU deployments to more customers and continue building the open, AMD-powered foundation for production AI." TensorWave Ever since the inception of Series A in May 2025, and now with Series B, TensorWave operates one of the largest fleets of AMD-based AI training clusters in the United States, with 8,192 Instinct MI325X AI GPUs already online, and massive deployments of AMD's Instinct MI355X GPUs ongoing across several new data centers in North America. The company has secured over 2 Gigawatts of long-term AI data-center capacity to support the growing adoption within Enterprise, Research, and AI-Native segments. TensorWave has been building towards this compute capacity since 2024, when it announced to build the world's largest AMD-powered clusters by 2025. "The race to build AI infrastructure has created urgent demand for providers who can deliver at speed without sacrificing reliability," said Ross Laser, Co-Founder and President of Magnetar. "TensorWave's partnership with AMD and its disciplined execution make it exactly that - and we believe it is positioned to become one of the most important compute providers for AMD-based AI workloads." TensorWave Soon, AMD is going to start shipping its next-generation Instinct MI455X GPU accelerators, offering even more capabilities and compute performance while reducing the TCO. This chip is set to battle out with the NVIDIA Vera Rubin series to power next-gen data centers globally. Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.