SambaNova hits $11 billion valuation as investors back Nvidia chip challengers

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An AI chip startup has raised $1 billion in financing as investors continue to pour money into companies looking to challenge Nvidia.

SambaNova is now valued at $11 billion thanks to the financing, which was led by General Atlantic along with participation from Seligman Ventures, T. Rowe Price and Capital Group.

The latest round of funding, announced Wednesday, comes after the startup raised more than $350 million earlier this year from investors including Intel, with which it also announced a partnership.

"Inference has broken everything open, and so what we're seeing now is that as a standalone company, you have the ability to really move fast and drive the business across a broad range of sectors," SambaNova's Co-founder and CEO Rodrigo Liang told CNBC at the Raise AI summit in Paris.

"We're scaling the business really, really fast, and so the capital allows us to really accelerate the deployments of the racks that customers really want," he said.

Liang added that the company is strongly considering an IPO in 2027, most likely in the U.S.

How SambaNova is targeting AI inference

SambaNova is one of a slew of startups looking to make waves in the market for inference chips. These are semiconductors designed to run large AI models in a quick and cost-efficient manner, which has become a particular focus for the industry as more complex AI agents are deployed.

The company sells its latest chip — the SN50 — as part of a server unit that can be deployed in data centers. This is different to the graphics processing unit (GPU) architecture that Nvidia has sold and has been critical for training huge AI models.

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But SambaNova is also focused on so-called on-premise deployments where its server units can be installed at a data center owned by a specific company. On Wednesday, JPMorgan Chase said it would deploy SambaNova's systems for "on-prem inference in our demanding enterprise AI workloads."

"JPMorgan has selected SambaNova to be the inference provider for the bank," Liang said.

"For banks and for other industries where data is incredibly important, bringing this infrastructure on prem, bringing this infrastructure with models that are then under your control with your private data, and having all within your firewalls is an incredibly important aspect of running AI in a very secure and private manner," he added.

SambaNova has said that on-premises inference can mean faster, more secure AI as it's controlled by the company using it rather than a third-party cloud provider or AI lab.

Public market investors have been bullish on the semiconductor sector, which is often dubbed the "picks and shovels" of the AI buildout. The PHLX semiconductor index, which tracks a basket of chip stocks, is up around 80% this year.

But there has been a flurry of activity in the private markets around chip companies that are trying to challenge the incumbents.

On Wednesday, Sunghyun Park, the CEO of South Korean startup Rebellions, told CNBC exclusively that it is gearing up for an initial public offering on the Kospi in the first or second quarter of 2027.

Last year, Nvidia signed a deal to license technology from inference chip startup Groq.