SambaNova raises at $11 billion valuation after Intel takeover talks stall

SambaNova raised $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation, a sharp jump from the $5.1 billion mark it reached in April 2021 and a long way from the roughly $1.6 billion Intel was said to be considering late last year. For a Palo Alto company founded in 2017 by Rodrigo Liang, Kunle Olukotun and Christopher Ré, the move is a stark measure of how far AI infrastructure has outrun older semiconductor pricing logic.

The company has spent years selling a full-stack enterprise AI platform built around custom chips and inference, the stage where models generate answers in production rather than learn from new data. SambaNova says its platform is aimed at generative AI workloads, and Intel's February collaboration framed the startup's technology as a way to deliver cost-efficient AI inference for AI-native companies, model providers, enterprises and government organizations on Xeon-based infrastructure. CNBC also said SambaNova counts Hugging Face, Meta and major AI labs among its customers, a sign that the company has been able to turn some of the AI boom into actual deployments.

Intel's role is what makes the valuation swing especially sharp. In December 2025, Intel was reported to be in advanced talks to buy SambaNova for about $1.6 billion including debt, then the talks stalled. By February 2026, Intel was back in the picture as both a partner and an investor, joining a $350 million round and signing on to a multiyear collaboration that would combine Intel server chips, graphics cards, networking and storage with SambaNova's systems. SambaNova's board also lists Lip-Bu Tan as chairman, and Tan is now Intel's chief executive, keeping the two companies closely linked even after the acquisition idea collapsed.

SambaNova's earlier financing shows how quickly that premium has climbed. In April 2021, the company raised $676 million in a Series D led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 at a valuation above $5 billion, with Temasek, GIC, BlackRock, Intel Capital and GV in the syndicate. Four years later, Intel Capital was back in a $350 million round and Intel itself had shifted from would-be acquirer to strategic partner, underscoring how central SambaNova's chips and software have become to the scramble for efficient inference hardware.