SAN JOSE, Calif., February 24, 2026, 23:52 (PST)
- SambaNova raised $350 million in a Vista Equity Partners- and Cambium Capital-led round that included Intel Capital
- The startup also signed a multi-year partnership with Intel focused on AI inference, with SoftBank set as first SN50 customer
- SambaNova is pitching its SN50 chip and rack systems as a lower-cost alternative to GPU-centric inference
AI chip startup SambaNova Systems said it raised $350 million in a funding round led by Vista Equity Partners and Cambium Capital and signed a multi-year partnership with Intel aimed at selling AI inference systems. SoftBank Corp will be the first customer to deploy SambaNova’s new SN50 chip in its AI data centres in Japan, SambaNova said. (Reuters)
The financing and tie-up land as companies shift spending from training large AI models to running them in production — a step known as inference, where chips generate answers and drive real-time decisions. That shift has turned power draw, latency and cost into board-level issues for cloud providers and large enterprises.
For Intel, the deal is another attempt to stay anchored in data-centre buildouts while customers look beyond a single vendor’s GPU-heavy stacks. SambaNova, meanwhile, is trying to turn a fast-moving market buzzword — “agents” — into booked revenue and hardware shipments.
Vista’s participation stands out because the private equity firm is better known for enterprise software deals than for silicon bets. SambaNova said it would use the proceeds to expand SN50 production, scale its SambaCloud platform and deepen enterprise software integrations.
Intel said the planned collaboration is built around Xeon-based infrastructure and is aimed at AI-native firms, model providers, enterprises and government organizations. The company said the arrangement complements Intel’s existing data-centre GPU plans and does not change its broader path in AI. (Newsroom)
SambaNova has framed the SN50 around “agentic” AI — systems that break a request into steps and loop through multiple model calls and tools, where waiting even a second too long can sink the experience. In a blog post, SambaNova said its Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit, or RDU, architecture is designed to cut data movement and memory bottlenecks, and it compared SN50 performance with Nvidia’s Blackwell B200 for agent-focused inference workloads. (Sambanova)
Rodrigo Liang, SambaNova’s co-founder and CEO, said the “real race” now is scaling data centres for agents “that answer instantly” at a cost that makes AI profitable. Intel data-centre chief Kevork Kechichian said customers are asking for “more choice” and a path to deploy AI at scale without leaning entirely on GPUs, according to a SambaNova statement that also said SN50 would ship later this year. (Sambanova)
SoftBank executive Hironobu Tamba said the Japanese group is building an “AI inference fabric” for Japan and wants the speed and “sovereignty” it can control inside its own data centres. SambaNova said the deployment is meant to support both open-source and proprietary models for enterprise and sovereign customers across Asia-Pacific.
Peter Rutten, a research vice-president at IDC, said the SN50 “changes the tokenomics” — the cost math of generating AI outputs — by pairing high throughput with air-cooled power limits. Vista Capital partner Monti Saroya said the startup is positioned for agentic systems that orchestrate multiple models and process requests in near real time.
But the sales pitch still hinges on performance and cost claims that customers will want to validate in their own environments, and on software support in a market long tuned to Nvidia’s tooling and developer ecosystem. Hardware schedules can slip, and inference buyers tend to move carefully once they have production workloads pinned to a stack.
The funding and partnership come after acquisition talks between Intel and SambaNova stalled, Reuters has reported. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, who also serves as SambaNova’s executive chairman, had previously discussed buying the startup for roughly $1.6 billion, including debt.
