# Tenstorrent and Smallest.ai offer real-time text-to-speech on on-premises hardware

Canonical page: https://technooptimist.io/stories/tenstorrent-and-smallest-ai-offer-real-time-text-to-speech-on-on-4875db2a
Date: 2 Oct 2026
About: [Tenstorrent](https://technooptimist.io/companies/tenstorrent.md)
Original source: https://tenstorrent.com/newsroom/tenstorrent-and-smallestai-partner-to-bring-production-grade-voice-ai-on-prem

Tenstorrent and Smallest.ai partnered to run Smallest.ai's Lightning V2 real-time text-to-speech model natively on Tenstorrent hardware, for deployments on a customer's own servers. The stack runs on Tenstorrent Galaxy Blackhole servers and is available now on usage-based pricing with no upfront commitment. The companies target financial services, telecom, healthcare and enterprise customers that need their data kept under their control.

## Key facts

- Smallest.ai's engineer claims 4x gains at a fraction of the cost of comparable GPU infrastructure; the release gives no cost, latency or concurrency figures.
- The release covers text-to-speech only; speech recognition, speech-to-speech and a full voice agent stack are not part of it.
- The release emphasises full data sovereignty but names no compliance certifications.
- Lightning V3 is not included in this release; the companies say work to bring it to Tenstorrent is underway.

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