SambaNova Raises $1 Billion as Valuation Jumps to $11 Billion

SambaNova Systems, a maker of chips for running large language models that competes with Nvidia, has closed the first tranche of a $1 billion Series F funding round. The round values the company at $11 billion, is led by General Atlantic, and a second tranche involving additional investors is expected to close in the coming weeks.

This is SambaNova's second major round in five months. In February, the company raised $350 million in a Series E, and before that, in December 2025, it was in talks to be acquired by Intel at a valuation of just $1.6 billion. The jump to an $11 billion valuation shows how quickly investor appetite is growing for alternatives to Nvidia in the AI hardware space.

Chips for large-scale inference

SambaNova specializes in what it calls premium inference, running models with as many as several trillion parameters at high speed. The company built its own reconfigurable dataflow unit (RDU) architecture, which it says allows very large models to fit on a single server rack and run faster than on conventional GPU-based systems.

The company's newest chip, the SN50, unveiled in February 2026, will go on sale in the second half of the year, with SoftBank as its first deployment partner. The previous model, the SN40L, has been commercially available since November 2023 and serves customers including Saudi Aramco.

JPMorgan bets on infrastructure outside the cloud

The biggest news accompanying the round is JPMorgan Chase's selection of SambaNova as its AI inference infrastructure partner. The bank will use SN40L and SN50 systems to run AI models securely and locally, without sending sensitive data to the public cloud.

The fact that JPMorgan Chase decided to select SambaNova as its inference solution is a big deal - Rodrigo Liang, CEO of SambaNova

For the banking sector, JPMorgan's decision signals that financial institutions are looking for alternatives to infrastructure tied to major cloud providers, especially for models that process confidential customer data. Liang said the capital raised will mainly go toward securing the supply chain and boosting manufacturing capacity over the next twelve months, as the company is seeing what he described as a massive wave of demand.

Context for Polish companies

The growing number of alternatives to Nvidia also matters for companies outside Silicon Valley, including Polish businesses planning to deploy AI locally rather than solely in the cloud. More players in the inference chip market could mean lower prices and a wider choice of suppliers for companies that, for regulatory or cost reasons, want to keep data processing on their own servers.

Liang remains evasive about a possible acquisition by a larger player, saying only that the company is regularly approached by potential buyers. The path SambaNova is currently charting points more toward a public listing in the longer term than a quick sale. The second tranche of the Series F round, expected in the coming weeks, could push the company's valuation even higher.

Sources: TechCrunch (techcrunch.com), General Atlantic (generalatlantic.com), Bloomberg (bloomberg.com)