AI chip startup SambaNova Systems has secured $1 billion in funding at an $11 billion valuation, led by General Atlantic in the initial close of its Series F round, with additional investors anticipated to join shortly. This latest investment comes about five months after the Palo Alto, California-based company introduced its SN50 chip, following a $350 million Series E round in February. According to a December report from Bloomberg News, SambaNova had also engaged in acquisition discussions with Intel, with a potential deal valuing the company at roughly $1.6 billion. When asked if completing its Series E and F rounds indicated that SambaNova, founded in 2017, had decided to remain independent, CEO Rodrigo Liang was noncommittal. He noted that the company continues to receive interest. "We're always being approached." Liang stated that the door remains open for such an exit in this dynamic AI market, but momentum and growth will likely steer the company toward "being public at some point."

SambaNova's relationship with Intel, an investor since its Series C and a participant in this latest round, has strengthened. Five months ago, the nine-year-old startup announced a multi-year partnership with Intel to support AI inference development using Intel's Xeon chip. The two companies now co-develop products and bring them to market together. "That gives us a great relationship with them that lets us leverage the scale of Intel with the technology we have," Liang explained. Alongside the new funding, SambaNova announced that it has been selected by JPMorganChase as an "inference-infrastructure partner," with its SN40L and SN50 systems set to power secure, on-premises AI inference at the bank. "It sends a message to the banking industry that it's time not to completely depend on cloud services. These banks want heterogeneous [infrastructure]."

EMBED_PLACEHOLDER_0

Liang said the JPMorgan win was a signal to the broader market. Banks "of the caliber of JP Morgan" are now building their own private, secure infrastructure to run inference on their most sensitive models, a move he expects will resonate beyond banking. Enterprises and governments are "just starting their AI journey," Liang continued, with most of the growth so far concentrated among tech's model makers and frontier labs, leaving what he called "a huge amount of revenue" still on the table. SambaNova launched its SN40L in September 2023, available in the cloud, and on-premises from November 2023. Its next-generation SN50, unveiled in February 2026, is due to begin shipping to customers in the second half of 2026, with SoftBank as its first deployment partner, Liang noted. Liang said SambaNova's edge lies in "premium inference" running the largest models and running them fast. Today's frontier models span trillions of parameters, and he said SambaNova was built specifically to handle them at that scale. The company fits multi-trillion-parameter models onto a single rack, which helps them run quickly.

SambaNova sees three types of customers. The first is sovereign clouds, where governments fund local partners to build private clouds, a push Liang expects SambaNova to figure centrally in. The second is neoclouds. The third is enterprises building for their own use. In addition to JPMorgan, it also names Saudi Aramco, Intel, and other Japanese firms as customers. SambaNova will use the proceeds to scale the business and shore up its supply chain against what Liang called an incredible wave of demand. "We're using that capital to secure the supply chain," he said, describing it as essential to fulfilling orders and buying the materials the company needs to deliver over the next 12 months. Other investors participating in the round include Seligman Ventures, T. Rowe Price Associates, and Capital Group. New and existing investors also joined, including A&E Investment, Assam Ventures, Battery Ventures, Cambium Capital, BlackRock, Kabila Capital, QFO Capital, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Vista Equity Partners, and Volantis.