SambaNova Locks In $1B at $11B Valuation as JPMorgan Chase Signs On for AI Inference

SambaNova Systems has pulled in the first $1 billion of a Series F round that values the AI chip maker at $11 billion, a jump that arrives alongside a marquee customer win: JPMorgan Chase has named SambaNova an inference-infrastructure partner for its internal AI systems.

General Atlantic led the raise, with T. Rowe Price, BlackRock, and the Qatar Investment Authority also putting money in. Intel, which has backed SambaNova since its Series C, returned as an investor too, a notable detail given that Bloomberg reported in December that Intel had explored an outright acquisition of the company for roughly $1.6 billion. Instead of buying SambaNova, Intel is deepening a multi-year partnership to develop AI inference capabilities built around its Xeon processors. The Series F's first close follows a $350 million Series E that closed in February 2026, and a second close of the current round is expected within weeks, according to the company.

For JPMorgan, the arrangement centers on running AI inference workloads on-premises rather than in the public cloud, a priority for a bank handling sensitive financial data. SambaNova's SN40L chip, which reached cloud availability in September 2023 and on-premises deployment two months later, will handle part of that load. The newer SN50 chip, unveiled in February 2026 alongside the Series E, is set to join it once shipments to customers begin in the second half of this year. SoftBank has already signed on as the SN50's first deployment partner, giving SambaNova an early proof point for the chip outside the JPMorgan deal.

The scale of this raise reflects how much capital investors are still willing to commit to challengers of Nvidia's dominance in AI compute, even as SambaNova, founded in 2017 and based in Palo Alto, has spent years carving out a niche in reconfigurable dataflow chips rather than GPUs. Landing a bank as large and risk-averse as JPMorgan Chase as a named partner lends the company a degree of enterprise credibility that funding rounds alone don't provide, particularly in a market where inference costs and data control have become as important to buyers as raw model performance.

Whether SambaNova can convert this valuation and customer momentum into sustained share against entrenched GPU supply chains is the open question the company now has to answer with the SN50's actual rollout. The chip's shipping timeline, still just months away, will be the next concrete test of whether the JPMorgan partnership and the fresh capital translate into deployed hardware at scale.