Intel secured multi-year AI inference deal with SambaNova following unsuccessful acquisition attempts.

SambaNova Systems announced a $350 million Series E funding round led by Vista Equity Partners and Cambium Capital, with strong participation from Intel Capital, alongside a new multiyear strategic collaboration with Intel and the unveiling of its next-generation SN50 AI chip. The San Jose, California-based startup said the SN50 is the "most efficient chip for agentic AI," capable of shipping later this year and performing up to five times faster than competitive chips while running agentic AI workloads at three times lower costs than GPUs. Intel plans to tap into its "enterprise, cloud and partner channels" to drive sales of joint offerings for "cloud-scale AI inference" as part of the partnership.

The collaboration follows the end of acquisition discussions between Intel and SambaNova, which according to Bloomberg stalled last month after first being reported in October. SambaNova's spokesperson said the acquisition deal is "not in discussion at this stage," while Intel declined to comment on the matter. Instead, Intel is leveraging the partnership to complement its AI infrastructure strategy spanning Xeon CPUs to GPUs. Kevork Kechichian, head of Intel's Data Center Group, stated: "Customers are asking for more choice and more efficient ways to scale AI. By combining Intel's leadership in compute, networking and memory with SambaNova's full-stack AI systems and inference cloud platform, we are delivering a compelling option for organizations looking for GPU alternatives to deploy advanced AI at scale."

Rodrigo Liang, SambaNova's co-founder and CEO, framed the broader market opportunity: "AI is no longer a contest to build the biggest model. With the SN50 and our deep collaboration with Intel, the real race is about who can light up entire data centers with AI agents that answer instantly, never stall, and do it at a cost that turns AI from an experiment into the most profitable engine in the cloud." The funding and partnership will support the SN50's production ramp and distribution, as SambaNova targets what it calls a multibillion-dollar market opportunity in cloud-scale AI inference.

The SN50 leverages SambaNova's Reconfigurable Data Unit (RDU) architecture to enable "ultra-low latency" for "real-time responsiveness" in applications like voice assistants and can "power thousands of simultaneous AI sessions with consistent high performance." The chip features three tiers of memory—SRAM, HBM and DDR—to offer "breakthrough model capacity" enabling the ability to run models with more than 10 trillion parameters and over 10 million context lengths. This three-tier memory architecture is optimized by the chip's "resident multi-model memory and agentic caching" to cut infrastructure costs for enterprise-scale AI deployments.

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan has served as chairman of SambaNova's board since the company's founding in 2017, with his investment firms Celesta Capital and Walden International serving as "long-standing investors." Japanese investment giant SoftBank Group is the first SN50 customer, planning to integrate the chip into next-generation AI data centers in Japan. The multiyear collaboration will focus on delivering "high-performance, cost-efficient AI inference solutions for AI-native companies, model providers, enterprises and government organizations around the world," with expansion of SambaNova's vertically integrated AI cloud platform using Intel's Xeon CPUs, supported by reference architectures, deployment blueprints and partnerships with systems integrators and software vendors.