SambaNova lands JPMorgan Chase as on-prem AI inference partner, validating enterprise adoption of alternative-architecture accelerators.

SambaNova Systems, an AI chip company based in Palo Alto, has raised $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation in the first close of its Series F round, led by General Atlantic, with additional investors expected in the coming weeks. CEO and co-founder Rodrigo Liang said the company continues to field acquisition interest but expects growth to eventually drive it toward a public listing rather than an exit.

The round follows SambaNova's $350 million Series E in February and the launch of its SN50 chip, building on a deepening partnership with Intel, a longtime investor now co-developing AI inference products with the company. Alongside the funding announcement, SambaNova has been selected by JPMorgan Chase as an inference-infrastructure partner, with its SN40L and SN50 systems set to power secure, on-premises AI inference at the bank. Liang described the deal as a signal that banks are moving away from full reliance on cloud services toward private infrastructure for sensitive AI workloads.

SambaNova's systems are built to run multi-trillion-parameter frontier models efficiently on a single rack, serving sovereign cloud, neocloud and enterprise customers including Saudi Aramco. The new capital will fund supply chain expansion to meet rising demand. Other investors include T. Rowe Price, BlackRock and the Qatar Investment Authority.