The Japan government-backed research group developing semiconductors will partner with U.S. startup Tenstorrent on the design of its first advanced AI chip.
Tenstorrent, led by Tesla and Apple veteran Jim Keller, will license its design for part of Japan’s artificial intelligence accelerator and also co-design the overall chip, the U.S. company said at a joint event in Tokyo on Tuesday. Working with the open-source RISC-V standard, Tenstorrent aims to provide customers with an alternative to the leaders Nvidia and Arm, who have their own so-called instruction sets to communicate between hardware and software.
The Japanese government is funding a range of projects from research to advanced chip manufacturing, making an ambitious $67 billion bid to reclaim a central role in the semiconductor industry. The Tenstorrent agreement has the potential to advance those efforts, with the goal of producing the jointly designed AI chips at the government-backed startup Rapidus.