Investors bet on AI chip companies competing with NVIDIA, SambaNova's valuation reaches $11 billion

Key Points

1. SambaNova has completed a new round of financing of $1 billion, with a post-investment valuation rising to $11 billion;
2. A large number of AI chip startups are currently receiving capital support, aiming to challenge NVIDIA's industry position, with SambaNova being one of them;
3. The company focuses on inference chips and locally deployed artificial intelligence solutions.

SambaNova CEO: Seriously preparing for an IPO, likely to be listed in the United States

An AI chip startup has completed a new round of financing of $1 billion, with capital continuously flowing into various chip manufacturers intending to challenge NVIDIA.

This round of financing was led by the Atlantic-Pacific Capital Group, with follow-on investments from Seligman Venture Capital, Insight Partners, and Capital Group, bringing SambaNova's overall valuation to $11 billion after the financing.

The company announced this financing on Wednesday; earlier this year, it had completed over $350 million in financing, with investors including Intel, and the two parties also reached a strategic cooperation at that time.

Rodrigo Liang, co-founder and CEO of the company, stated in an interview at the Raise AI summit held in Paris: "The inference market has completely opened up a new track. As an independent company, we can iterate quickly and deploy business across various industries."

"Our business expansion is very rapid, and this funding will help us accelerate the delivery of complete server cabinet products that meet customer needs," he added.

Liang also revealed that the company is seriously planning to complete its initial public offering in 2027, with the preferred listing location being the United States.

SambaNova's Logic for AI Inference Market Layout

A large number of startups aiming to revolutionize the inference chip field have emerged in the market, with SambaNova being a representative. Inference chips are designed for efficient and low-cost operation of large AI models, and as complex intelligent AI agents are deployed on a large scale, inference chips have become a key focus area in the industry.

The company promotes its latest SN50 chip, delivered with complete server cabinet solutions, which can be directly deployed in enterprise data centers. The architecture of this product is entirely different from NVIDIA's main GPUs—NVIDIA's GPUs focus more on ultra-large-scale model training.

At the same time, SambaNova is deeply engaged in local deployment solutions, allowing customers to deploy the entire set of server equipment in their own data centers. On Wednesday, JP Morgan announced that it would introduce SambaNova systems for local inference computing of high-load AI business.

SambaNova claims that local inference allows enterprises to have autonomous control over their data, without relying on third-party cloud vendors or AI laboratories, resulting in faster operation speeds and higher data security Investors in the secondary market are generally optimistic about the semiconductor sector, with the chip industry being referred to as the "shovels and pickaxes" in the wave of artificial intelligence construction (upstream essential infrastructure). The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index covers a number of leading chip stocks, which have seen an increase of nearly 80% this year.

In the primary market, various chip startups attempting to shake up industry giants are continuously making financing moves.

On the same day, Park Seung-hyun, CEO of the South Korean AI chip startup Rebellions, exclusively revealed that the company is preparing to go public on the Korea Composite Stock Price Index in the first or second quarter of 2027.

Last year, NVIDIA reached a technology licensing agreement with inference chip company Groq