SambaNova, AI 칩 제조사, 마지막 대규모 자금조달 5개월 만에 100억 달러 가치로 10억 달러 조달

AI chipmaker SambaNova Systems has closed the first tranche of its Series F funding round, raising $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation. The round was led by General Atlantic, with additional investors expected to join shortly. “In the next few weeks, a few more investors will be coming in, and the second close is likely to finish up,” Rodrigo Liang, CEO and co-founder of SambaNova, told TechCrunch.

This latest financing arrives roughly five months after the Palo Alto-based startup unveiled its SN50 chip alongside a $350 million Series E raise in February. Prior to that, Bloomberg News reported in December that SambaNova had entered acquisition discussions with Intel, valuing the company at approximately $1.6 billion. When asked whether closing both rounds signaled a decision to remain independent, Liang remained noncommittal regarding the nine-year-old company, founded in 2017. He noted that the firm continues to receive acquisition interest. “We’re always being approached,” Liang said. While acknowledging that an exit remains possible in the dynamic AI market, he added that current momentum and growth trajectory will most likely steer the company toward “being public at some point.”

SambaNova’s relationship with Intel has deepened significantly. Intel, which has backed the company since its Series C round and participated in this latest funding, announced a multi-year partnership five months ago to support AI inference development built on Intel’s Xeon architecture. The two companies now co-develop products and bring them to market jointly. “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 capital, SambaNova announced it has been selected by JPMorgan Chase as an “inference-infrastructure partner.” The bank will deploy SambaNova’s SN40L and SN50 systems to power secure, on-premises AI inference workloads. “Having JPMorgan Chase decide they’re going to use SambaNova for their inference solution is a big deal,” Liang said. “It sends a message to the banking industry that it’s time not to completely depend on cloud services. These banks want heterogeneous [infrastructure].” Liang emphasized that major financial institutions are increasingly building private, secure infrastructure to run inference on highly sensitive models—a trend he expects to extend well beyond banking. With enterprises and governments “just starting their AI journey,” he noted that recent growth has largely been concentrated among tech companies’ model developers and frontier labs, leaving “a huge amount of revenue” still available in the broader market.

SambaNova originally launched its SN40L system in September 2023 for cloud deployments, followed by on-premises availability in November 2023. Its next-generation SN50 platform, unveiled in February 2026, is scheduled to begin customer shipments in the second half of 2026, with SoftBank serving as its inaugural deployment partner. According to Liang, SambaNova’s competitive advantage lies in “premium inference”—executing the largest models with exceptional speed. As today’s frontier models span trillions of parameters, the company engineered its hardware specifically to operate at that scale, fitting multi-trillion-parameter models onto a single rack to maximize performance.

SambaNova identifies three primary customer categories: sovereign clouds, where governments fund local partners to construct private infrastructure; neoclouds; and enterprises developing solutions for internal use. Beyond JPMorgan Chase, the company lists Saudi Aramco, Intel, and several Japanese corporations as clients. The newly raised capital will be directed toward scaling operations and reinforcing the supply chain amid what Liang described as an unprecedented surge in demand. “We’re using that capital to secure the supply chain,” he said, stressing that securing components is critical to fulfilling existing orders and purchasing the materials required to meet delivery commitments over the next 12 months.

In addition to General Atlantic, participating investors in the round include Seligman Ventures, T. Rowe Price Associates, and Capital Group. The round also saw participation from a mix of new and existing backers, including A&E Investment, Assam Ventures, Battery Ventures, Cambium Capital, BlackRock, Kabila Capital, QFO Capital, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Vista Equity Partners, and Volantis.