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SambaNova has raised $350 million in a funding round backed by Intel Capital, Vista Equity, and other VCs, scotching acquisition rumors. Intel and SambaNova are entering a multi-year hardware-software co-design collaboration targeting GPU alternatives for generative AI. The funding will support SambaNova's fifth-generation SN50 reconfigurable dataflow unit (RDU), expected to ship later this year with SoftBank as an early customer. The SN50 delivers 1.6 petaFLOPS at FP16 and 3.2 petaFLOPS at FP8, using HBM2E and up to 2 TB of DDR5 memory. While raw specs trail Nvidia's Blackwell GPUs, SambaNova claims up to 5x higher per-user generation speed versus the B200, backed by real-world benchmark data showing its SN40L already leads GPU-based inference providers on tokens-per-second for large models. The company's three-tier memory hierarchy enables rapid model swapping, targeting the economics of multi-tenant inference workloads as AI agents drive demand for customized models.

SambaNova raises $350M with Intel backing