SambaNova Systems has launched its new SN50 AI chip and secured over $350 million in Series E funding. This move strengthens its ongoing collaboration with Intel and aims to increase its market share in AI inference.
The financing round was led by Vista Equity Partners and Cambium Capital, with participation from Intel Capital, Battery Ventures, and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., among others.
SambaNova plans to use new funding to increase the production of its SN50 hardware, grow its cloud services, and improve software integrations for businesses.
As AI moves from testing to large-scale use, the company believes that hardware designed for inference will be crucial for future data centres.
According to the company, the SN50 delivers up to five times faster performance than competing chips and can run agentic AI workloads at roughly three times lower cost than traditional GPU-based systems.
The chip is expected to begin shipping to customers later this year.
Multi-year collaboration with Intel
Alongside the product launch and funding, SambaNova announced a planned multi-year strategic collaboration with Intel. The partnership aims to deliver high-performance, cost-efficient AI inference solutions for AI-native companies, enterprises, model providers, and government organisations.
“Customers are asking for more choice and more efficient ways to scale AI,” said Kevork Kechichian, EVP, General Manager, Data Center Group, Intel. “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 organisations looking for GPU alternatives to deploy advanced AI at scale.”
As part of the collaboration, Intel will invest in SambaNova to help develop an AI cloud powered by Intel technology. The collaboration will focus on enhancing AI cloud infrastructure using Intel Xeon processors and integrating SambaNova systems with Intel’s hardware.
Both companies will also work together on marketing efforts through Intel’s global channels. Their goal is to create advanced AI data centres that combine various types of hardware, such as CPUs, GPUs, and specialised inference tools, to tap into a large market opportunity.
Built for large-scale AI inference
SambaNova is focusing on the growing need for AI inference, which involves using trained models in real-time applications.
Many data centres were initially set up for model training, but now companies need infrastructure that is faster, more efficient, and cost-effective for live use.
The SN50 chip is built on SambaNova’s new architecture designed for large-scale AI tasks with low latency. It offers five times more computing power and four times more network bandwidth compared to the previous version.
It can connect up to 256 chips through a fast interconnect, improving response times and enabling larger data batches. This design allows businesses to use larger AI models with more extensive context while maintaining good performance. The chip can handle models with over 10 trillion parameters and context lengths of more than 10 million tokens.
“AI is no longer a contest to build the biggest model,” said Rodrigo Liang, co‑founder and CEO of SambaNova. “With the SN50 and our deep collaboration with Intel, the real race is about who can light up entire data centres 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.”
SoftBank to deploy SN50 in Japan
SoftBank Corp. will be the first customer to deploy the SN50 in its next-generation AI data centres in Japan. The deployment will support low-latency inference services for sovereign and enterprise customers across Asia-Pacific.
According to SoftBank, the new clusters will serve both open-source and proprietary frontier models while meeting strict latency and throughput requirements. The move builds on SoftBank’s existing partnership with SambaNova, which already hosts SambaCloud services in the region.
“With SN50, we are building an AI inference fabric for Japan that can serve our customers and partners with the speed, resiliency and sovereignty they expect from SoftBank,” said Hironobu Tamba, Vice President and Head of the Data Platform Strategy Division of the Technology Unit at SoftBank Corp. “By standardizing on SN50, we gain the ability to deliver world‑class AI services on our own terms — with the performance of the best GPU clusters, but with far better economics and control.”
