SambaNova Series F funding has closed at $1 billion, valuing the AI chip maker at $11 billion. General Atlantic led the round, and additional investors are expected to join a second close within weeks.
Rodrigo Liang, SambaNova’s chief executive, said the second close would likely finish soon. The round lands roughly five months after SambaNova unveiled its SN50 chip and closed a $350 million Series E in February 2026. Talks to sell the company to Intel, which had valued SambaNova at around $1.6 billion, stalled earlier this year.
The jump from a $1.6 billion acquisition offer to an $11 billion funding valuation in the same year shows how quickly investors are pricing AI inference infrastructure. SambaNova builds custom chips designed to run large language models more cheaply than general-purpose GPUs, competing against both Nvidia’s data center hardware and rival startups chasing the same enterprise customers.
SambaNova Series F funding follows a stalled Intel deal
Intel first backed SambaNova during its Series C and joined this latest round too, adding to a relationship that already includes a multi-year deal to co-develop AI inference products using Intel’s Xeon chips. That partnership was announced five months before this funding close. Liang stayed noncommittal on whether SambaNova would remain private. He said the company keeps fielding acquisition interest but expects to reach public markets eventually as growth continues.
JPMorgan picks SambaNova for on-premises inference
JPMorgan Chase named SambaNova its “inference-infrastructure partner,” with the company’s SN40L and SN50 systems set to power secure, on-premises AI inference at the bank. Liang called the deal significant. He pointed to it as a sign that banks are shifting toward infrastructure they control directly instead of relying only on cloud providers.
Financial institutions face stricter data-handling rules than most industries. Regulators expect banks to know exactly where customer data sits and how it moves through a model, which makes on-premises deployment appealing. JPMorgan’s choice gives SambaNova a reference customer that other regulated industries, including healthcare and government agencies, may point to when evaluating similar hardware.
Where the new funding goes
SambaNova sells into the premium inference market, fitting models with trillions of parameters onto a single rack for fast execution. The company targets three kinds of customers: government-funded sovereign clouds, neoclouds, and enterprises. Its customer list also includes Saudi Aramco and several Japanese firms.
The SN40L launched in September 2023, with on-premises availability arriving that November. The next-generation SN50 begins shipping to customers in the second half of 2026, with SoftBank as its first deployment partner. SambaNova plans to put the new funding toward scaling operations and locking down supply chains as demand grows.
The round drew a wide investor base, including:
- Seligman Ventures
- T. Rowe Price Associates
- Capital Group
- BlackRock
- Battery Ventures
- Vista Equity Partners
- Qatar Investment Authority