Palo Alto-based AI chip startup SambaNova Systems has raised US$1 billion in the first close of its series F round led by General Atlantic, valuing the company at US$11 billion.

The company said additional investors are expected to join in a second close. Intel also participated in the round.

The fundraising follows SambaNova’s US$350 million series E round in February 2026, when it introduced its SN50 AI chip.

The company previously raised a US$676 million series D at a US$5.1 billion valuation in 2021, after earlier backing that included Intel Capital and BlackRock.

SambaNova said the SN50 delivers five times the compute performance and four times the network bandwidth of its predecessor, the SN40, targeting AI inference workloads including AI agents, coding assistants, enterprise copilots, conversational AI, and retrieval-augmented generation.

Separately, SambaNova and Intel outlined an AI inference architecture that pairs SambaNova’s reconfigurable dataflow units with Intel Xeon 6 processors for enterprise, cloud, and sovereign AI deployments.

The company also said JPMorganChase has selected the company as an infrastructure partner for secure, on-premises AI inference.

🔗 Source: TechCrunch