JPMorgan Just Challenged the Cloud-Only AI Thesis

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The AI infrastructure story that has dominated markets for the past two years has had one assumed ending: eventually, every enterprise will migrate its AI workloads to the hyperscaler cloud. AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle (ORCL) — pick your platform, pay per token, and let someone else worry about the hardware.

JPMorgan Chase (JPM) just added an important asterisk.

This week, SambaNova Systems — an AI chip company that Intel (INTC) reportedly tried to acquire for about $1.6 billion less than a year ago — raised $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation.

The customer that made the announcement so interesting was JPMorgan Chase, which selected SambaNova as its inference-infrastructure partner, deploying its systems to power secure, on-premises AI inference at the bank.