Qualcomm Makes a Play for Tenstorrent: A Bet on Open Silicon

Every monopoly has a blind spot, and it's usually to be found where nothing has been patented. While Nvidia and AMD carve up the accelerator market on their own proprietary, closed architectures, Qualcomm — according to The Information and Reuters (June 15) — is in talks to buy Tenstorrent, for a sum ranging from eight to ten billion dollars.

A year ago that same company was seeking 800 million at a valuation of 3.2 billion; the present conversation is three times as dear. What's being paid for, of course, isn't the machinery. Tenstorrent gives Qualcomm three things it lacks all at once: a coherent route into the data center, experience with the open RISC-V architecture, and Jim Keller — an engineer whose name is on the finest processors of the past two decades. The deal's structure, it's reported, includes payouts tied to agreed-upon milestones.

The calculation is a subtle one. RISC-V is not a product but a shared blueprint: an open instruction set that anyone is free to build on. To bet on it is to bypass not a competitor but the very fortress wall of licenses, and to step into a place where the rules are written in common. That, so the rumors go, is why Intel too is eyeing Tenstorrent: the table where open cards are dealt is getting crowded.

So far neither side has confirmed anything, and the talks may come to nothing. But the direction speaks louder than the outcome: when the heavyweights start buying up what's open, that is the surest sign of which way the ground is tilting.