SambaNova Secures $1 Billion Funding at $11 Billion Valuation in Major AI Chip Expansion

AI chip developer SambaNova Systems has raised $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation in the first close of its Series F funding round. The investment was led by General Atlantic, with the company indicating that additional investors are expected to participate before the financing round is completed.

Speaking about the fundraising, SambaNova CEO and co-founder Rodrigo Liang said more investors are expected to join over the coming weeks, adding that the second close of the Series F round is likely to be finalised shortly.

The latest investment arrives around five months after the Palo Alto, California-based company introduced its SN50 AI chip alongside a $350 million Series E funding round in February. Earlier reports from Bloomberg News in December also revealed that SambaNova had engaged in acquisition discussions with Intel, with the proposed transaction reportedly valuing the company at approximately $1.6 billion.

When asked whether the successful completion of both its Series E and Series F rounds indicated that SambaNova had decided to remain independent, Liang stopped short of giving a definitive answer. He explained that the company continues to receive acquisition interest, saying, “We’re always being approached.” While he acknowledged that the rapidly evolving AI market leaves the door open to potential acquisition opportunities, he suggested that the company’s current momentum and growth make an eventual public listing the more likely direction.

SambaNova has also continued to strengthen its relationship with Intel, which has been an investor since the company’s Series C round and participated in the latest funding round. Five months ago, the two companies announced a multi-year partnership focused on advancing AI inference development using Intel’s Xeon processors. According to Liang, the collaboration has since expanded to include joint product development and go-to-market efforts. He said the partnership enables SambaNova to combine its own AI technology with Intel’s global scale.

Alongside the funding announcement, SambaNova revealed that JPMorgan Chase has selected it as an inference infrastructure partner. Under the agreement, the company’s SN40L and SN50 AI systems will be deployed to support secure, on-premises AI inference capabilities within the bank.

Liang described the partnership with JPMorgan Chase as a significant milestone for the company, saying the decision by one of the world’s largest financial institutions to adopt SambaNova’s inference technology sends an important signal to the broader banking sector. He suggested that major financial organisations are increasingly seeking alternatives to relying entirely on cloud-based AI infrastructure, instead favouring more diverse and privately managed computing environments.

According to Liang, the JPMorgan deployment reflects a broader industry shift. He said banks of JPMorgan’s scale are beginning to invest in their own secure infrastructure to operate inference workloads for highly sensitive AI models. He believes this trend will eventually spread beyond financial services as enterprises and governments continue to expand their AI initiatives. While much of the industry’s growth has so far been concentrated among major AI model developers and frontier laboratories, Liang said significant commercial opportunities remain in other sectors that are only beginning to adopt AI.

SambaNova first introduced its SN40L platform in September 2023, making it available through cloud services before expanding to on-premises deployments in November of the same year. Its next-generation SN50 processor, unveiled in February 2026, is expected to begin shipping to customers during the second half of 2026. Liang noted that SoftBank will become the first deployment partner for the new chip.

Liang said SambaNova’s competitive advantage lies in what he described as “premium inference,” focusing on running the largest AI models with high performance. Modern frontier AI models now contain trillions of parameters, and he explained that SambaNova’s hardware architecture was engineered to process models at that scale efficiently. The company can fit multi-trillion-parameter models into a single rack, enabling those workloads to operate at much higher speeds.

SambaNova categorises its customers into three primary groups. The first consists of sovereign cloud providers, where governments support local organisations in building secure domestic cloud infrastructure, an area Liang expects will become increasingly important for the company. The second group includes neocloud providers, while the third consists of enterprises deploying AI infrastructure for their own operations. Alongside JPMorgan Chase, SambaNova lists Saudi Aramco, Intel, and several Japanese companies among its customers.

The company plans to use the newly raised capital to expand its operations while strengthening its supply chain to meet rapidly increasing demand. Liang said the funding will help secure critical components and manufacturing capacity needed to fulfil customer orders over the coming year, describing supply chain investment as essential to supporting the company’s projected growth during the next 12 months.

In addition to General Atlantic, the funding round includes participation from Seligman Ventures, T. Rowe Price Associates, and Capital Group. Several new and existing investors also joined the financing, including A&E Investment, Assam Ventures, Battery Ventures, Cambium Capital, BlackRock, Kabila Capital, QFO Capital, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Vista Equity Partners, and Volantis.