Dive Brief:
- SambaNova and Intel announced a multiyear partnership to support cost-efficient AI inference capabilities as enterprise adoption of AI advances, the two companies said Tuesday.
- The AI provider said it raised $350 million in Series E financing for manufacturing and cloud capacity expansion with participation from Intel Capital.
- Intel’s investment will help speed rollout of an Intel-powered AI cloud that scales SambaNova’s AI cloud offering on Intel Xeon-based infrastructure to support large language and multimodal models, powering “scalable, production-ready inference for reasoning, code generation, multimodal applications and agentic workflows,” the company said.
Dive Insight:
Intel faced supply chain issues last year as the chip giant fought to forge a turnaround in a competitive AI compute market. Now, Intel is teaming up with SambaNova to offer speed and cost efficiency in AI inferencing to enterprises.
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, who was brought on last year to lead the company’s turnaround efforts, also serves as chairman of the board at SambaNova.
The inference market is not fully baked and is “absolutely up for grabs” compared with model training that is dominated by leaders like Nvidia, Gartner VP Analyst Chirag Dekate told CIO Dive. Enterprises want a cohesive strategy to ensure inference capabilities are deeply integrated within core operations, he said.
“This is where Intel is starting to find its footing in a really comprehensive manner,” Dekate said.
SambaNova brings in external expertise and a “different approach to addressing AI workloads and AI scaling from what Intel and frontrunners Nvidia and AMD are doing today,” Forrester Senior Analyst Alvin Nguyen told CIO Dive in an email.
“The fact that this was a partnership and not an acquisition is telling,” Nguyen said. “This is a lower investment that allows the companies to prove out the technology, without the pressure and distraction an acquisition would bring.” Intel was rumored to be in talks to acquire the chipmaker, something that can’t be ruled out in the future when Intel is stronger, Nguyen said.
Intel’s partnership with SambaNova complements the chip giant’s existing GPU commitments and “does not alter its path forward to competing in AI,” Intel said in a press release. The company plans to continue investing in GPU IP while advancing the “next generation of heterogeneous AI data centers, integrating Intel Xeon processors, Intel GPUs, Intel networking and storage and SambaNova systems.”
“By combining Intel’s leadership in compute, networking, and memory with SambaNova’s full-stack AI systems and inference cloud platform, we are delivering a compelling option for organizations looking for GPU alternatives to deploy advanced AI at scale,” Kevork Kechichian, EVP and general manager of the Data Center Group at Intel, said in a press release.
Along with its Intel partnership, SambaNova introduced the SN50 AI chip, which the company said runs agentic AI at a cost three times lower than traditional GPUs, while also performing five times faster than competitor chips. The company plans to use its Series E financing to scale and distribute the SN50, which is set to ship to customers later this year.
SoftBank Corp., a major telecommunications provider based in Japan and a subsidiary of SoftBank Group, will be the first to deploy SN50 within its AI data centers for the company’s enterprise and sovereign customers across Asia-Pacific, according to SambaNova.
“With SN50, we are building an AI inference fabric for Japan that can serve our customers and partners with the speed, resiliency and sovereignty they expect from SoftBank,” Hironobu Tamba, VP and head of the data platform strategy division of the technology unit at SoftBank, said in the press release.
