Inference chip startup SambaNova valued at $11B in $1B funding round
Chip startup SambaNova Inc. today announced that it has raised $1 billion in funding at a $11 billion valuation.
General Atlantic led the Series F round with contributions from more than a dozen others. Intel Capital, Vista Equity Partners and JPMorgan Chase & Co. were among the participants. The investment follows a $350 million round in February.
SambaNova debuted its flagship product, an inference chip called the SN50, in conjunction with the February raise. The company says that the accelerator can provide more than three times as much throughput as Nvidia Corp.’s B200 graphics card. The SN50’s top speed, in turn, is described as being five times faster.
Artificial intelligence models generate prompt responses through an iterative process. A set of artificial neurons analyzes the user’s prompt, generates a preliminary response and saves the response to memory. A second set of artificial neurons then retrieves the preliminary response, refines it and saves the results back to RAM. The workflow is repeated numerous times until the AI arrives at an answer.
