SambaNova Raises $1B at an $11B Valuation as Inference Demand Surges

The chip startup's first close of a Series F, led by General Atlantic, values it at $11 billion — a sharp rebound built on enterprises like JPMorgan Chase buying Nvidia alternatives to run AI in-house.

Jul 9, 2026Source: TechCrunch

SambaNova Raises $1B at an $11B Valuation as Inference Demand Surges

The scramble for AI inference capacity just minted another heavyweight. SambaNova Systems said on July 8 it raised $1 billion in the first close of a Series F led by General Atlantic, valuing the chip maker at $11 billion post-money. A second close is expected "in the coming weeks," meaning the full round could run higher.

Who's in

The investor list skews toward deep-pocketed institutions: Seligman Ventures, T. Rowe Price, Capital Group, funds managed by BlackRock, Intel Capital, the Qatar Investment Authority, Vista Equity Partners and Battery Ventures. Tellingly, JPMorgan Chase showed up on both sides of the deal — as an investor and as a customer deploying SambaNova hardware for secure, on-premises inference.

A rebound, not a straight line

The $11B valuation reads better against SambaNova's recent history. After a $5.1 billion peak in a 2021 SoftBank-led round, the company reportedly drew acquisition interest from Intel at just ~$1.6 billion in December 2025, then raised a modest $350 million Series E in February. The Series F marks a roughly 7x step-up off that low — powered by a market that has swung hard toward inference. "SambaNova's $11 billion valuation highlights the central role that fast inference now plays in the enterprise AI stack," said CEO Rodrigo Liang.

The hardware

SambaNova's pitch rests on its Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit (RDU) architecture — the SN40L chip, and the newer SN50 unveiled in February and shipping in the second half of 2026, with SoftBank named as the first deployment partner. The company positions the dataflow design, with its three-tier memory, as better suited to serving large and multi-model agentic workloads than the GPU or SRAM-only approaches of rivals like Nvidia, Groq and Cerebras. Liang said the fresh capital will "secure the supply chain" — funding orders and materials over the next 12 months.

The macro bet

Underlying it all is a supply crunch: demand for inference, Liang said, is "accelerating well ahead of supply," with a "hockey stick" of customers seeking alternatives to Nvidia while driving down cost-per-token. The named wins — JPMorgan Chase for on-prem inference, plus sovereign and enterprise buyers — reflect a broader shift among regulated firms toward private infrastructure for sensitive AI workloads. "Having JPMorgan Chase decide they're going to use SambaNova for their inference solution is a big deal," Liang said.

Why It Matters

SambaNova's raise is a bet that the AI buildout's next phase is dominated by inference — running models, not training them — where cost, energy and data-control pressures push enterprises toward Nvidia alternatives and on-premises silicon. Landing JPMorgan Chase as an anchor is the kind of regulated-industry proof point that could pull other banks and sovereign buyers off cloud GPUs, and it validates a challenger cohort — SambaNova, Groq, Cerebras — betting against CUDA's lock-in.

Filed underAI Chips Finance AI #General Atlantic #Rodrigo Liang #SambaNova #inference