en.Wedoany.com Reported - US AI chip company SambaNova Systems has successfully secured $1 billion (approximately IDR 16 trillion) in new funding during its recent early Series F round. The round was led by General Atlantic, valuing the company at $11 billion.
Rodrigo Liang, CEO and co-founder of the Palo Alto, California-based company, confirmed to TechCrunch that more investors will join in the short term. He mentioned that some investors will come on board in the coming weeks, and a second close could be completed soon. This new funding arrives about five months after the company unveiled its latest chip, the SN50, in February 2026. Prior to this, the company, founded in 2017, successfully completed a $350 million Series E round in February of this year.
JPMorgan Chase's decision to use SambaNova as its inference solution is considered a significant achievement by the company. Liang noted that this move sends a strong signal to the banking industry that it is time to not fully rely on cloud services, as these banks desire heterogeneous infrastructure. Winning JPMorgan is seen as a signal to the entire market that banks like JPMorgan are now building their own private, secure infrastructure for running inference on their most sensitive models.
SambaNova positions itself in the "advanced inference" space, capable of running the largest AI models at high speed. Current frontier AI models have parameters reaching trillions, and the company claims its technology is specifically designed to handle this scale. The company can fit models with trillions of parameters into a single server rack, helping models run quickly, a technical advantage that serves as a key selling point in competition with giants like NVIDIA. Liang outlined three main customer categories for SambaNova: sovereign clouds, neoclouds, and enterprises building their own infrastructure to meet their needs. Besides JPMorgan, customers include Saudi Aramco, Intel, and several Japanese companies.
SambaNova's relationship with Intel is increasingly close. Intel has been an investor since the company's Series C round and participated in the latest round. Five months ago, the nine-year-old startup announced a multi-year partnership with Intel to support the development of AI inference based on Intel Xeon chips. The two companies now co-develop products and co-sell. Liang stated that this has established a good relationship with Intel, allowing them to leverage Intel's scale and technology. Although reports last December suggested SambaNova had acquisition talks with Intel at a valuation of around $1.6 billion, Liang did not commit to the company's independence. He mentioned that the company constantly receives offers and the door to acquisition remains open, but the current momentum and growth will likely drive the company to go public "at some point."
SambaNova will use the new funds to expand its business and strengthen its supply chain. Liang mentioned a surge in demand, and they are using this capital to secure the supply chain, which is crucial for fulfilling orders and purchasing materials needed for shipments over the next 12 months. Other investors in this round include Seligman Ventures, T. Rowe Price Associates, and Capital Group. Other new and existing investors include A&E Investment, Assam Ventures, Battery Ventures, Cambium Capital, BlackRock, Kabila Capital, QFO Capital, the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Vista Equity Partners, and Volantis. The SN50 chip, announced in February 2026, is scheduled to begin customer deliveries in the second half of 2026, with SoftBank as the first deployment partner. The previous generation chip, the SN40L, was launched in September 2023, has been available on the cloud since then, and has been available on-premises since November 2023.
Liang emphasized that enterprises and governments are just beginning their AI journey, with most growth so far concentrated among model makers and frontier labs in the tech sector, leaving a vast amount of untapped revenue. With new funding and strategic partnerships, SambaNova is positioned to seize these opportunities. Focusing on on-premises inference for handling sensitive data has become a major attraction for financial institutions and governments requiring security and full control over their AI infrastructure.
