SambaNova Completes $1B Funding Round, Securing an $11B valuation
On its fifth-generation chip yet still failing to dent the AI processing market, SambaNova has closed a $1 billion round. This follows a $350 million round earlier this year. The company bases its chips on a CGRA architecture, an array of compute and memory units onto which an AI model’s graph maps. Artificial Analysis reports SambaNova (which has its own cloud offering) delivers high token rates, an increasingly important metric. This could be a factor in a recent announcement that the startup is teaming with Intel on a heterogeneous system employing both SambaNova chips and GPUs. Intel isn’t a competitive GPU supplier, however, making it hard to see how the arrangement will increase the startup’s sales. SambaNova must show performance data and customer traction before we take the $11 billion valuation seriously.
