Tenstorrent Brand Guidelines: The Toronto AI Chip Start-up Led by Jim Keller

Three former AMD engineers and a chip of 120 cores.

Tenstorrent was founded in Toronto in 2016. The Canadian technology publication BetaKit, reporting in October 2026, names its founders as Ljubisa Bajic, Ivan Hamer and Milos Trajkovic, all former employees of AMD; an earlier BetaKit report, from January 2023, describes Bajic as a former architect at both AMD and Nvidia who had led the firm since its start. Trajkovic is still with the company: Tenstorrent’s own leadership page lists him as a co-founder and senior fellow in charge of systems engineering and low-level software.

The company set out to build hardware for machine learning. Its first chip, Grayskull, carried 120 processing cores that Tenstorrent calls Tensix cores, BetaKit reported in 2023. The company had planned to bring Grayskull to market in late 2021, but a spokesperson told the publication that it delayed the launch to develop the software its customers would use with the chips. By early 2023 the company had about 280 staff, offices in Belgrade and Bangalore as well as Toronto, Austin and Silicon Valley, and had added RISC-V processors — the open instruction-set architecture — as a priority on its roadmap.

A turning point in the company’s history was the arrival of Jim Keller, the processor designer whose career, as Tenstorrent’s own biography lists it, runs through DEC, AMD, Apple, Tesla and Intel. BetaKit reported that Keller had been an early angel investor before he joined as president and chief technology officer in 2021. In January 2023 he and Bajic swapped roles: Keller became chief executive and Bajic became president and CTO, saying the change would let him give his “full focus” to the technology. Bajic later left to build another chip company, Taalas.

Tensix cores, RISC-V and an open software stack.

Tenstorrent sells its hardware at several sizes and licenses the designs underneath it. On its website the range runs from PCIe cards — Wormhole boards, which the company says pair Tensix cores with small “baby RISC-V” cores, and Blackhole boards, which it describes as having 120 Tensix cores and 16 larger RISC-V cores per chip — to the TT-QuietBox liquid-cooled workstation and Tenstorrent Galaxy servers that link into what it calls superclusters. BetaKit reported in October 2026 that the company had begun shipping Galaxy servers commercially.

Licensing is the second half of the business. BetaKit wrote in December 2024 that Tenstorrent licenses its AI and RISC-V intellectual property to clients who want to own and customise their own silicon, and in October 2026 named LG and Samsung among those licensees. A Tenstorrent spokesperson told the publication that the company sees its open-source software as what sets it apart, saying that “AI models keep changing, so hardware has to run whatever comes next.” The company publishes two software kits, the high-level TT-Forge compiler, which it says is built on MLIR and works with PyTorch, JAX and ONNX, and the lower-level TT-Metalium, and in October 2026 it released an open-source beta of a chiplet tool it calls the Open Chiplet Atlas harness.

Partnerships reach well beyond North America. Tenstorrent’s newsroom lists, among others, a project with the Japanese company PFN selected in October 2026 for a NEDO programme on processors that integrate photonics and electronics, and a drug-discovery platform in Japan with ai&, running on Galaxy servers. BetaKit named the trading firm Virtu Financial and the data-centre operator Equinix among its clients and partners, and reported that in 2025 the company bought Blue Cheetah Analog Design to strengthen its in-house chip design.

On manufacturing, the documented detail is limited: BetaKit reported in October 2026 that the company still makes a number of its parts at the Markham, Ontario, site of the electronics manufacturer Vexos.

How AI chip companies present themselves.

AI chip companies sell something most of their customers will never see. The processor sits inside a server, the server sits in a rack, and the rack sits in a data hall far from the people who use the models running on it. So the industry’s visual language has grown up around making that hidden hardware visible: a whole silicon wafer, as wide as a dinner plate, held up on a keynote stage; a single chip pinched between finger and thumb for the cameras; a die shot recoloured in neon false colour so that its blocks of memory and compute read like a city map at night.

The second set of images is the data centre. Press photographs tend to show long rows of racks in dark halls, lit by the glow of status lights and cold aisles, with cabling arranged as neatly as a diagram. These pictures stand in for scale, which is what buyers of AI compute are being asked to imagine, and they appear again and again in launch announcements, partner news and investor material.

Keynote slides do much of the remaining work. Model names, token counts and benchmark charts appear beside the chip’s own product name, and the companies’ identities are usually kept spare to let those numbers and images lead: black or white grounds, a single accent colour, a sans-serif wordmark and very little ornament. Several firms have adopted coined product categories, names for their processors that set them apart from the graphics processor.

The shop window is the technical conference. Hot Chips, NeurIPS and the AI Infra Summit are among the events where architectures are presented, demonstrations run and booths compete for engineers’ attention. This guide looks at how each company in the group presents itself, and keeps to what can be checked about who founded it, who owns it and what it makes.

Canadian-founded, US-based.

Tenstorrent has moved its headquarters but kept its Canadian base. BetaKit reported in December 2024 that the company had quietly relocated its headquarters from Toronto to Santa Clara, California; a company executive told the publication that one large investor wanted to raise its stake beyond a cap that applied to companies based outside the United States, and that the move was a common step ahead of an eventual stock-market listing. In October 2026 BetaKit reported that Toronto remained its largest office, with about 200 of its roughly 1,000 employees.

The company is privately held and funded in rounds. Its Series D, closed in December 2024, was led by AFW Partners and Samsung Securities, with investors including Bezos Expeditions, LG Electronics and Hyundai Motor Group, BetaKit and TechCrunch reported. In October 2026 it announced a Series E led by Trace Capital and Innovation X, which it says will fund volume manufacturing of Galaxy servers, new hardware and hiring. BetaKit also noted that in summer 2026 The Information and Bloomberg had reported takeover interest from Intel and Qualcomm; Keller told EE Times that a listing remained the company’s target, and a spokesperson declined to comment on those reports.

The brand itself is run as a company function. Tenstorrent’s leadership page says its chief experience officer, Christine Blizzard, oversees brand, product, communications and go-to-market, and that before joining she founded y3k, a brand studio working at the meeting point of technology and culture. Keller’s own line, quoted in the 2026 funding announcement, sums up the pitch: “We built one architecture and sell it at every size.”

For a design guide, Tenstorrent shows how a chip start-up can build an identity around open software, a famous engineer and a single architecture sold from desk to data centre. Compare AMD, where its founders and its chief executive once worked, and Intel. For this guide we use a deep violet, coral and pale lilac with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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