AI chip startup SambaNova plans to raise up to $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation

SambaNova CEO Jensen Huang (Chen Liwu) said the AI chip company plans to raise $800 million to $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation. That's five times its valuation from just four months ago, when it closed a $350 million Series E round at around $2 billion.

The rapid valuation jump shows strong investor interest in AI inference chips. Jensen Huang is also the CEO of Intel, a key investor in SambaNova.

The two companies previously built an AI inference hardware solution that combines GPUs, Intel Xeon CPUs, and SambaNova's RDU chips. The high-memory RDU is designed to handle the decoding step in AI models, aiming to improve inference speed.