AI chip startup SambaNova has raised $1 billion in a Series F funding round led by General Atlantic, catapulting its valuation to $11 billion as demand for inference-specific hardware continues to surge.
The round included significant investment from Seligman Ventures, T. Rowe Price Associates, and Capital Group, along with A&E Investment, Assam Ventures, funds managed by BlackRock, Intel Capital, and the Qatar Investment Authority. SambaNova said it will use the capital to expand capacity, scale deployments globally, and continue investing across its full-stack AI infrastructure stack — chips, systems, and software.
SambaNova specializes in custom chips and systems purpose-built for inference — the compute-intensive process where trained AI models respond to user queries. That focus has become increasingly strategic as enterprises shift from training massive models to running them in production, creating a new wave of demand for hardware optimized for inference rather than training.
The company also announced that JPMorgan Chase has selected SambaNova as an inference infrastructure partner, deploying its SN40 and SN50 systems for AI inference workloads — a major enterprise endorsement that signals growing appetite for alternatives to Nvidia’s dominant GPU lineup.
This latest raise follows a busy year for SambaNova. In February, it secured $350 million to fund expansion of its SN50 AI chip and struck a partnership with Intel to deliver low-cost inference solutions for AI-native companies. That deal included a $35 million Intel investment, which received U.S. antitrust clearance in May. Reuters later reported Intel planned an additional $15 million investment that would bring its ownership stake to around 9%.
The company has now raised well over $2 billion since its 2017 founding. In 2021, it landed a $676 million round led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 at a $5 billion valuation — meaning its worth has more than doubled in five years.
The raise underscores a broader trend: as AI adoption moves from hype to production, the inference layer is becoming a battleground. Startups like SambaNova, Groq, and Cerebras are all racing to chip away at Nvidia’s near-total grip on the datacenter AI market, betting that specialized inference silicon will win out in the long run.
Source: Reuters via Yahoo Finance
