On-Prem Voice Agents Get New Hardware Path as Smallest.ai Joins Tenstorrent

Tenstorrent and Smallest.ai announced a partnership on October 1, 2026, to deliver a production-grade, on-premises voice AI stack that runs Smallest.ai’s Lightning V2 real-time text-to-speech model natively on Tenstorrent Galaxy Blackhole servers. Tenstorrent, an AI compute company, and Smallest.ai, an AI research lab building real-time voice AI infrastructure, said the joint stack is designed to reduce deployment costs while delivering the performance required for real-time voice applications.

The companies said running Lightning V2 on the Blackhole architecture lets organizations operate real-time voice agents entirely on-prem with full data sovereignty, targeting high-volume, data-sensitive workloads across financial services, telecom, healthcare, and enterprise environments. Lightning V2 is available on Tenstorrent hardware immediately, with usage-based pricing and no upfront commitments. “There shouldn’t need to be a choice between performance and cost – Tenstorrent has built efficient and scalable compute that reduces the cost of existing workflows and makes entirely new workloads practical,” said Amr Elashmawi, Vice President of Strategy & Business Development at Tenstorrent.

The server platform named in the announcement is built around 32 Blackhole ASICs delivering 23 PFLOPS of Block FP8 compute,…