SambaNova raises 1 billion dollars to take on Nvidia in inference

Future Technology, 20 July 2026

AI chip company SambaNova has raised 1 billion dollars at an 11 billion dollar valuation, one of the largest recent rounds aimed squarely at inference, the job of running AI models rather than training them.

Inference is where the ongoing cost of AI lives, and a wave of companies now wants to undercut Nvidia on the chips that serve models to users. SambaNova joins in-house efforts from OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepSeek, all chasing cheaper tokens.

Why it matters: the money is shifting from training hype to the unglamorous economics of serving models at scale, and that is where the next chip war gets fought.

Related: DeepSeek's inference chip play.