In December 2025, Intel offered to buy SambaNova Systems for $1.6 billion. The AI chip startup said no.
Five months later, SambaNova raised $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation — nearly seven times what Intel offered. The message is clear: SambaNova thinks it's worth far more as an independent company than as an Intel division. And JPMorgan Chase, one of the world's most conservative banks, just agreed.
The Funding Frenzy
SambaNova's Series F round, led by General Atlantic, is the latest mega-funding in an AI chip market that shows no signs of cooling. The round comes just five months after a $350 million Series E in February 2026, when SambaNova unveiled its SN50 chip.
The Palo Alto-based startup, founded in 2017, has now raised well over $2 billion in total. Investors include Intel (a backer since Series C), BlackRock, Qatar Investment Authority, Vista Equity Partners, and a who's who of Wall Street and sovereign wealth.
CEO Rodrigo Liang isn't ruling out an eventual exit. "We're always being approached," he told TechCrunch. But the momentum, he says, points toward going public. "Being public at some point" is the most likely outcome.
The JPMorgan Win
The funding announcement came with a customer bombshell: JPMorgan Chase has selected SambaNova as an "inference-infrastructure partner." The bank will use SambaNova's SN40L and SN50 systems to power secure, on-premises AI inference.
This is a massive deal for several reasons. First, JPMorgan is one of the world's most risk-averse institutions. If they're betting on a startup over Nvidia or cloud providers, it signals something important about the maturity of SambaNova's technology.
Second, it validates SambaNova's core thesis: enterprises and banks want to run AI on their own infrastructure, not send sensitive data to cloud providers. "These banks want heterogeneous infrastructure," Liang said. "It's time not to completely depend on cloud services."
Third, it opens the floodgates. When JPMorgan moves, other banks follow. SambaNova is now positioned as the chip company for regulated industries that can't afford to leak data.
The Intel Partnership
SambaNova's relationship with Intel is complicated. Intel tried to buy the company for $1.6 billion. When that failed, Intel became an investor and partner instead.
The two companies now co-develop products based on Intel's Xeon chips, combining Intel's manufacturing scale with SambaNova's AI accelerator technology. "That gives us a great relationship with them that lets us leverage the scale of Intel with the technology we have," Liang said.
It's a classic Silicon Valley story: today's acquisition target is tomorrow's partner. Intel gets access to cutting-edge AI tech without the regulatory headache of a full acquisition. SambaNova gets Intel's manufacturing muscle and credibility.
The Technology
SambaNova's edge is what it calls "premium inference" — running the largest AI models at high speed. The company claims it can fit multi-trillion-parameter models onto a single rack, something that typically requires dozens of Nvidia GPUs.
The SN50, unveiled in February, begins shipping in the second half of 2026. SoftBank is the first deployment partner. The chip is designed specifically for inference — the phase where trained models generate responses — not training.
This is a smart niche. While Nvidia dominates training, the inference market is larger and less settled. Every company that trains a model needs to run it, and most will run it far more often than they train it.
🔥 Hot Takes
1. Intel's $1.6 billion offer will go down as one of the worst missed acquisitions in tech history. If SambaNova goes public at $20 billion or $30 billion — entirely plausible given the AI chip gold rush — Intel's board will be asking hard questions about who said no and why. This is Yahoo-passing-on-Google level bad.
2. The real AI chip war isn't Nvidia vs. AMD — it's Nvidia vs. everyone else combined. SambaNova, FuriosaAI, Cerebras, Groq, and a dozen other startups are all chipping away at Nvidia's dominance. None can match Nvidia alone. But together, they're creating a fragmented market where enterprises have real choices for the first time. That's bad for Nvidia's margins and great for customers.
3. JPMorgan choosing SambaNova is the enterprise AI tipping point. Banks don't bet on startups unless they're desperate or the startup is genuinely better. JPMorgan isn't desperate. This means on-premise AI inference is now mainstream, not experimental. The cloud-only AI era is ending.
The Bottom Line
SambaNova's $11 billion valuation is a bet that the AI chip market is big enough for multiple winners. It's also a bet that enterprises will increasingly want to own their AI infrastructure rather than rent it from cloud providers.
With JPMorgan as a customer, Intel as a partner, and $1 billion in fresh capital, SambaNova has positioned itself as the enterprise-friendly alternative to Nvidia. Whether it can deliver on that promise — and justify an $11 billion price tag — will depend on the SN50's performance when it ships later this year.
But one thing is already clear: turning down Intel's $1.6 billion was the best decision SambaNova ever made.