SAMBANOVA VALUED AT $11BN AFTER $1BN FUNDING ROUND

SambaNova, an artificial intelligence chip startup, raised $1 billion in financing, according to an announcement on Wednesday. The funding round valued the company at $11 billion. General Atlantic led the round, with participation from Seligman Ventures, T. Rowe Price and Capital Group. The capital injection follows a prior funding round earlier this year in which the company raised more than $350 million, including investment from Intel, with which SambaNova also announced a partnership.

SambaNova designs inference chips — semiconductors engineered to run large artificial intelligence models efficiently — and focuses on on-premise deployments where server units are installed at individual company data centres. The company's latest offering, the SN50 chip, is sold as part of a server unit for deployment in data centres, distinguishing its approach from the graphics processing unit architecture that Nvidia has marketed for training artificial intelligence models. Rodrigo Liang, SambaNova's co-founder and chief executive, stated that inference capabilities have opened new market opportunities and that the company is scaling deployments across multiple sectors.

Liang told CNBC that SambaNova is strongly considering an initial public offering in 2027, most likely in the United States. He indicated that the fresh capital would accelerate deployment of server units that customers require. SambaNova is one of several startups attempting to establish a market presence in inference chips as artificial intelligence adoption expands across industries.