Jim Keller

Jim Keller said he was born in New Jersey, the second of six children; his father was a GE Aerospace mechanical engineer who designed satellites, and his mother had trained as a teacher and later became a therapist. The family later lived near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and he attended high school in the Philadelphia suburbs in the 1970s.⁠[1]

He recalled entering Penn State in 1976 to study electrical engineering; after graduating he worked at Harris in Florida, then spent about 15 years at Digital Equipment.⁠[1]

He holds a BS in electrical engineering from Penn State University.⁠[2]

He first worked at AMD in the late 1990s.⁠[3]

At AMD he was part of the system engineering team behind the K7 and played a key role on the K8; he co-authored the HyperTransport specification.⁠[4]

AMD said he had played an instrumental role on the design team responsible for the Athlon 64 and Opteron processors.⁠[5]

He then served at SiByte and Broadcom as chief architect of a line of MIPS-based network processors; in 2004 he moved to P.A. Semi, where he led a team that developed a networking system-on-a-chip with an integrated PowerPC processor.⁠[4]

When Apple acquired P.A. Semi in 2008 he came to Apple with the deal, where his role was listed as A4/A5 designer.⁠[5]

On August 1, 2012, AMD announced that he was returning as corporate vice president and microprocessor chief architect.⁠[6]

In September 2014 AMD chief executive Rory Read said the company had brought him in for Zen and K12, two microarchitectures aimed at high-performance and server applications that were being developed by teams he headed.⁠[7]

He left AMD in late 2015 after leading development of the Zen architecture for three years; in January 2016 Tesla confirmed it had hired him as vice president of Autopilot Hardware Engineering.⁠[3]

His wife, Bonnie, a nurse, is the sister of psychologist Jordan Peterson.⁠[8]

On February 5, 2020, then at IntelIntelIntel is a semiconductor company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, founded by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore in 1968; it introduced the 4004 microprocessor in 1971, its x86 processors have long powered personal computers, it has pursued a foundry strategy since 2021, and Lip-Bu Tan has been its chief executive officer since 2025.Open the full entry, he appeared on episode 70 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, “Moore’s Law, Microprocessors, Abstractions, and First Principles,” discussing differences between computers and the brain, abstraction layers, whether Moore’s law is still alive, Tesla Autopilot, and working with Elon MuskElon MuskElon Musk is an entrepreneur who founded SpaceX and has long served as chief executive of Tesla; he also took part in creating PayPal, OpenAI, Neuralink, The Boring Company, and xAI. He acquired Twitter in 2022, and his businesses span spaceflight, electric vehicles, energy, artificial intelligence, and social media.Open the full entry.⁠[9]

At Intel he oversaw about 10,000 people; he left in June 2020 and later described his time there as “super fun.”⁠[10]

On February 18, 2021, he returned for episode 162 of the Lex Fridman Podcast, “The Future of Computing, AI, Life, and Consciousness”; the summary notes he was now at Tenstorrent, and topics included RISC vs. CISC, hardware for deep learning, Tesla Dojo, Neuralink and advice for young people.⁠[11]

On May 20, 2021, Tenstorrent announced it had raised more than $200 million at a $1 billion valuation in a round led by Fidelity. He said, as CTO: “We are bringing to market a highly programmable chip at an accessible price point as a means of driving innovation.”⁠[12]

An interview that month said he had been Tenstorrent’s first investor and had joined the company about five months earlier; he said he knew chief executive Ljubisa Bajic, who had worked on real GPU chips and understood the math behind AI.⁠[13]

In early 2023 he swapped jobs with Ljubisa Bajic to become Tenstorrent’s chief executive; Bajic became CTO in January and left the company that summer while keeping a board seat.⁠[10]

In January 2023, people familiar with the matter said he and Sam Zeloof had founded Atomic Semi, a chipmaking startup aiming to use radically simplified, miniaturized fabs to produce chips in hours, and that the OpenAI Startup FundOpenAI Startup FundThe OpenAI Startup Fund is a venture fund set up by OpenAI in May 2021 with an initial $100 million from Microsoft and other partners to invest in early-stage AI companies. It had raised about $175 million by 2023, and control passed to Ian Hathaway in March 2024.Open the full entry was weighing a role in a seed round of about $15 million at a $100 million valuation, with the deal not yet final.⁠[14]

On April 7, 2023, former Intel chief architect Raja Koduri joined Tenstorrent’s board. He said: “Raja Koduri joining our board is a huge win for Tenstorrent.”⁠[15]

On May 30, 2023, Tenstorrent and LG Electronics announced a collaboration on RISC-V, AI and video codec chiplets for LG’s future premium TVs and automotive products and for Tenstorrent’s data center products.⁠[16]

In August 2023 Tenstorrent closed a $100 million strategic up-round co-led by Hyundai Motor Group and Samsung Catalyst Fund. He said: “The trust in Tenstorrent shown by Hyundai Motor Group and Samsung Catalyst Fund leading our round is truly humbling.”⁠[17]

On February 27, 2024, Japan’s Leading-edge Semiconductor Technology Center (LSTC) selected Tenstorrent’s RISC-V and chiplet IP for a new 2nm edge AI accelerator, with Tenstorrent also working with Rapidus.⁠[18]

In December 2024 Tenstorrent closed more than $693 million in Series D funding at a $2 billion pre-money valuation, led by Samsung Securities and AFW Partners, with investors including LG Technology Ventures, Hyundai Motor Group, Fidelity and Bezos ExpeditionsBezos ExpeditionsBezos Expeditions is Jeff Bezos’s personal investment platform, whose public portfolio spans the internet, enterprise software, life sciences, artificial intelligence, and robotics. Its investment activity is separate from Amazon’s corporate investments, and disclosed holdings include Business Insider, Skild AI, and Generalist.Open the full entry.⁠[19]

On April 3, 2025, at its Dev Day in San Francisco, Tenstorrent launched the next-generation Blackhole chip family, with PCIe cards from $999 and the four-processor liquid-cooled TT-Quietbox workstation at $11,999.⁠[20]

On December 4, 2025, Tenstorrent announced the immediate availability of TT-Ascalon, its high-performance RISC-V CPU IP, saying it runs at more than 2.5 GHz on Samsung’s SF4X process.⁠[21]

After the TT-Deploy event in June 2026 he argued that AI inference is ultimately a networking and memory problem and that Tenstorrent’s Blackhole Galaxy server can beat GPUs and more specialized AI hardware; in a demonstration, 16 Galaxy servers (512 chips) ran DeepSeek-671B at up to 350 tokens per second per user.⁠[22]

On October 19, 2026, Tenstorrent announced a $1.5 billion Series E at a $6.2 billion post-money valuation, led by Trace Capital and Innovation X. He said: “We built one architecture and sell it at every size.”⁠[23]

As of October 2026 he is CEO of Tenstorrent. The company says he previously spent two years as senior vice president of Intel’s Silicon Engineering Group and was Tesla’s vice president of Autopilot and Low Voltage Hardware, AMD’s corporate vice president and chief cores architect, and P.A. Semi’s vice president of engineering and chief architect, leading designs from the DEC Alpha processors to AMD K7/K8/K12 and the Zen family, Apple’s A4/A5 and Tesla’s self-driving chip.⁠[24]

X: Public account: https://x.com/jimkxa (opens in a new window)⁠[11]

Tenstorrent: Official website: https://tenstorrent.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[24]