SambaNova Raises $1 Billion at an $11 Billion Valuation - JPMorgan Chase Picks It for On-Prem AI Inference

AI chip company SambaNova Systems announced on July 8, 2026 that it has completed the first close of $1 billion in strategic financing as part of its Series F round¹. The deal values the company at $11 billion post money¹. General Atlantic led the round, with significant investment from Seligman Ventures, T. Rowe Price Associates, and Capital Group¹.

Announced alongside the funding was a marquee customer win: JPMorganChase has selected SambaNova as an inference infrastructure partner and will deploy its SN40 and SN50 systems to power secure, on-premises AI inference¹. In a market where NVIDIA is widely seen as dominant, an alternative architecture drew both major institutional capital and a top-tier financial adoption on the same day.

Inside the Round - Another Mega Raise Just 5 Months Later

The investor list includes new and existing backers such as A&E Investment, Assam Ventures, Battery Ventures, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Cambium Capital, Intel Capital, Kabila Capital, QFO Capital, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Vista Equity Partners, and Volantis¹². According to TechCrunch, the raise comes just five months after the company’s last mega round³. A second close is reportedly expected in the coming weeks³.

The proceeds will go toward expanding capacity, accelerating product innovation, and scaling deployments for enterprises, neo-clouds, sovereign AI customers, and service providers worldwide¹. The company says it will continue investing across chips, systems, software, and full-stack AI infrastructure².

Founded in 2017 and headquartered in San Jose, California, SambaNova develops chips built on its own RDU (Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit) architecture, pursuing inference efficiency through an approach distinct from GPUs¹. It has also been advancing its collaboration with Intel on heterogeneous inference—combining different types of chips².

What JPMorgan’s On-Prem Inference Deal Signals

The practical headline here is the JPMorganChase deployment. The bank will run SN40 and SN50 systems inside its own facilities as an on-premises AI inference platform for sensitive data that can’t leave for the cloud¹. Darrin Alves, CIO of Infrastructure Platforms at JPMorganChase, said the bank’s AI infrastructure has to meet a very high bar for performance, control, and reliability, and expressed enthusiasm about deploying SambaNova’s RDU architecture¹.

In regulated industries like finance, handing customer data and transaction records to external cloud AI services is difficult—so as AI adoption deepens, demand grows for inference infrastructure that runs inside the company’s own walls. Separate from the giant GPU clusters used for training, the option of placing power-efficient, inference-focused chips on premises now has a concrete precedent at one of the world’s largest banks.

The center of gravity in AI infrastructure investment is also expanding from training models to running them day after day. As agentic AI workloads increase, inference volume keeps compounding, and this segment seems likely to keep attracting capital. For a technical comparison of SambaNova and other NVIDIA alternatives, see our guide to next-generation AI chip vendors.

Big Money Keeps Flowing into AI Infrastructure

Large-scale AI infrastructure funding continued throughout the week. Like Abu Dhabi’s MGX fund, this SambaNova round includes Qatar Investment Authority, showing sovereign wealth flowing into the AI chip space as well. Elsewhere, SoftBank established its US neocloud company SB Neo, further diversifying the field of inference infrastructure providers.

An $11 billion valuation remains small next to NVIDIA’s market cap, but whether SambaNova can keep stacking up a distinctive customer base through its inference-focused positioning—on-prem demand in regulated industries and sovereign AI—will likely determine its next valuation.