Layoffs At Tenstorrent As Startup Pivots Towards Developer Sales

//php echo do_shortcode('[responsivevoice_button voice="US English Male" buttontext="Listen to Post"]') ?> AI chip startup Tenstorrent has undergone a round of layoffs, cutting 7.5% of its staff and bringing its headcount down to around 1,000.While no particular part of the company is shrinking with layoffs coming from across the business, the company is nevertheless undergoing some changes, Tenstorrent CEO Jim Keller told EE Times.“We grew really fast, and not everybody works out …. we’re not cutting for financial reasons,” Keller said. “It’s partly skills and mindset, partly team fit. Healthy organizations [lose] 6-10% of people voluntarily and involuntarily each year.” The company reviews all new hires after two months, but it has become harder to identify employees who are not making the cut now that the company has shipped “hundreds” of servers, with manufacturing yield improving steadily, Keller said. Changes in the business include increased use of AI for programming, which Keller said had been adopted more successfully by some team members, and less so by others. Tenstorrent has also pivoted its sales strategy away from enterprise sales and towards individual developers, resulting in a reduction in size of the enterprise sales team.“In the long run, the big guys will make [us] the most money, but that’s not where we are in our journey,” Keller said.While the company is making enterprise sales, there is more to be learned by working directly with developers, he added.“The number one rule of enterprise sales is never sell to little people, because it’s a waste of time, but we’re building a new product, a new technology,” Keller said. “A lot of really cool applications come directly from developers, so I’m telling the whole company that our focus is developers and small businesses, and we’ll work our way up.”The exception is Tenstorrent’s IP business, which continues to sell to companies via its own sales team.In terms of roadmap, Tenstorrent’s third-gen technology will be chiplet-based. These chiplets were due to tape out this quarter, but are now scheduled to tape out in Q1 2026. Keller ascribed delays to the acquisition of Blue Cheetah’s die-to-die PHY IP last summer, and the related publication of Tenstorrent’s Open Chiplet Architecture specification, both of which prompted design changes.The company has undergone well-reported challenges with software development, but is steadily bringing up more models with around 70 up and running on BlackHole-generation hardware today, Keller said. A third party was able to bring up DeepSeek and Gemini models and while their performance was around halfway to Tenstorrent’s target, the companies are working together to find and fix bugs.“The goal for this year is 100 models up and running [on BlackHole] and 1000 developers on Discord,” Keller said. “We’re hitting that.”