US chip startup SambaNova scores billion-dollar funding round

American AI chip startup SambaNova said Wednesday it had been valued at $11 billion, in a $1 billion fundraising round announced at the Raise Summit industry event in Paris.

The company's juiced valuation highlights the growing importance of its specialist area of AI "inference", the process by which AI models generate a response to users' everyday queries, over the arduous and costly effort of "training" new models from scratch.

Founded in 2017 and backed by US semiconductor heavyweight Intel, California-based SambaNova will use the latest cash infusion to "continue investing across chips, systems, software, and full-stack AI infrastructure," the company said in a statement.


Although the market for AI computing power has been surging since the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT three years ago, it gained still more momentum around the turn of 2026 as more people began using AI agents.

These tools can carry out computing tasks from programming to sending emails in response to users' natural-language prompts.

But their capabilities are founded on vast processing power furnished by data centres stuffed with high-performance semiconductors.

For now, those chips are largely provided by multi-trillion-dollar US giant Nvidia, whose dominance has made it the largest company in the world by market capitalisation.

Newcomers like SambaNova are betting that they can carve out a niche with their chips designed specifically for cost-effective inference, rather than brute processing power.