Nvidia challenger working with South Korea and Japan

While investors reassess their exposure to Nvidia and TSMC in light of Donald Trump’s remarks about Taiwan, Canadian AI chip, software and hardware design company Tenstorrent stands out as a competitive alternative to TSMC, one that works with IC foundries in South Korea and Japan.

In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek published on July 16, Trump said, “I know the people [of Taiwan] very well, respect them greatly. They did take about 100% of our chip business. I think Taiwan should pay us for defence…. Taiwan doesn’t give us anything.”

“Taiwan took our chip business from us,” he repeated, “I mean, how stupid are we? They took all of our chip business. They’re immensely wealthy. And I don’t think we’re any different from an insurance policy. Why? Why are we doing this?”

By the end of the week, the share prices of Nvidia and TSMC had both dropped by more than 8%.

Tenstorrent is not publicly traded. Unlike Nvidia, it does not depend on TSMC. Founded in 2016, Tenstorrent is headquartered in Toronto with offices in Santa Clara and three other locations in the US plus Bengaluru (Bangalore), Beijing, Gyeonggi-do (Seoul Capital Area), Tokyo and Beograd (Belgrade).

The company currently has about 460 employees and is growing rapidly, with 45 open positions – CPU architect, CAD engineer, systems software engineer, account executive, etc. – listed on its website.

CEO Jim Keller, who joined the company in 2020, is a legendary IC designer who built his reputation at AMD, Apple, Tesla and other prominent companies. His strategy is to design AI solutions that are more efficient and cost much less than those of Nvidia.

His colleague, Chief CPU Architect Wei-han Lien, who also came to Tenstorrent via AMD and Apple, recently told