Potential takeover would represent significant commitment to the open instruction set architecture

Qualcomm is reportedly moving to buy AI chip firm Tenstorrent, an acquisition that could prove a major boost to the RISC-V ecosystem.

This comes from The Information, which cites an anonymous source claiming that a deal valued at $8 billion to $10 billion is under discussion.

According to the report, the talks are ongoing and there is no certainty a deal will be reached, but the move would fit with Qualcomm's datacenter ambitions and bullish statements about AI opportunities made by its chief, Cristiano Amon.

The Register asked Qualcomm and Tenstorrent to comment.

Tenstorrent is a Canadian AI chip startup that bases its products on the permissively licensed RISC-V processor architecture. The company is led by CPU guru Jim Keller, known for his design work at AMD, Apple, and on DEC's Alpha chips back in the day.

The firm's Galaxy Blackhole AI compute platform went on sale earlier this year, packing 32 of its Blackhole accelerators, each with 768 RISC-V cores, into a 6U enclosure running its own software stack.

Qualcomm is also keen on RISC-V, especially since its licensing court battle with chip designer Arm, which wanted to nix Qualy's license to create its own Arm-based processor silicon.

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