SambaNova completed the first close of $1 billion in Series F financing on Wednesday, valuing the AI chip company at $11 billion post-money, with JPMorgan $JPM Chase joining as an inference infrastructure customer.
General Atlantic led the round, with significant participation from Seligman Ventures, T. Rowe Price $TROW Associates, and Capital Group. New and existing investors include BlackRock $BLK, Intel $INTC Capital, the Qatar Investment Authority, Battery Ventures, Vista Equity Partners, and Volantis, among others, the company said. SambaNova said a second close is expected in the coming weeks.
JPMorgan Chase will deploy SambaNova's SN40 and SN50 systems to run AI workloads on its own premises rather than through a third-party cloud provider. "At JPMorganChase, AI infrastructure has to meet a very high bar for performance, control and reliability," said Darrin Alves, chief information officer of infrastructure platforms at JPMorganChase, in a statement.
SambaNova co-founder and CEO Rodrigo Liang said the JPMorgan relationship signals a broader shift. "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," Liang said.
Inference — the computational process of generating responses from a trained AI model — is the focus of SambaNova's custom chip and hardware system business. Its chips are designed to work alongside Nvidia $NVDA products rather than replace them. Liang told Bloomberg that SambaNova's SN40 and SN50 chips can run the decode portion of inference five to ten times faster than competing approaches, freeing up capacity for other tasks.
SambaNova will use the proceeds to expand production capacity, scale deployments for enterprise, sovereign AI, and neo-cloud customers, and continue investing in chips, systems, and software, the company said. Liang told TechCrunch that securing the supply chain against strong demand is a priority use of the capital.
Earlier this year, in February, SambaNova closed a $350 million Series E that brought Intel on both as a strategic partner and an investor. Prior acquisition discussions between the two companies had broken down, and regulators granted antitrust approval for the investment arrangement in May, according to Reuters.
Liang said the company is considering an IPO in 2027, most likely in the U.S., according to CNBC.