SambaNova Systems Inc. has released the most advanced AI processor and successfully raised $350 million (approximately 5.04 trillion Korean won) from investors including Vista Equity Partners and Cambium Capital. Several investment firms participated in this funding, including Intel Capital. SambaNova plans to collaborate with Intel to develop high-performance systems for AI inference.
The newly launched SN50 chip offers five times the computing power and four times the network bandwidth of its predecessor, and can connect up to 256 accelerators at multi-terabit-per-second speeds. This enables larger context AI models to be supported more economically. Technically, the SN50 is similar to Google’s tensor processing units or AWS’s Trainium chips, designed for high-performance training and inference of large-scale language models.
Through its partnership with Intel, SambaNova aims to leverage Intel’s Xeon processors to build efficient infrastructure optimized for multimodal large language models. This collaboration is expected to combine SambaNova with Intel’s global channels, strengthening its position in the AI chip market. Experts believe that if SambaNova’s platform with Intel is competitive, it could serve as a strong alternative to NVIDIA GPUs.