SambaNova claims SN50 hits up to five times faster max speed and up to three times lower total cost of ownership, with shipping planned later this year.

Intel and SambaNova are expanding their collaboration under a multiyear agreement to adopt Intel server chips and GPUs for SambaNova’s AI chips and systems, while Intel participates in a $350 million funding round for SambaNova.

SambaNova’s Series E funding of $350 million, led by Vista Equity Partners and Cambium Capital, with participation from Intel Capital and other investors, will advance its dataflow architecture and fund production expansion, SambaCloud, and enterprise integrations.

SN50 is built on SambaNova’s Reconfigurable Data Unit architecture, designed for agentic AI with real-time, low-latency inference and large-scale concurrent sessions.

SN50 is deployed with SoftBank as a customer, emphasizing a heterogeneous environment approach to leverage new AI hardware technologies.

SN50 delivers roughly five times more compute per accelerator and four times more network bandwidth than the previous generation, with interconnects capable of linking up to 256 accelerators at multi-terabyte-per-second speeds.

The oversubscribed round also included a broad slate of new and existing investors, and the proceeds aim to scale SN50 production and related enterprise offerings.

Performance comparisons from analysis show SN50 achieving higher token throughput than Nvidia GPUs on models like Llama 3.3 70B, GPT-OSS 120B, and DeepSeek 671B, underscoring efficiency and production-oriented economics.

SN50 supports 10T+ parameter models and 10M+ context lengths through a three-tier memory architecture to boost throughput and responsiveness.

SambaNova reports record bookings and revenue for 2025, reflecting rising demand for production-ready AI systems across financial services, telecommunications, energy, and sovereign deployments.

The company aims to expand its cloud offerings for running AI models and sell data center clusters, positioning itself as a complementary or alternative path to Nvidia-dominated AI infrastructure.

SambaNova, counting Hugging Face, Meta, and major AI labs among its customers, plans joint sales and marketing with Intel to promote the SN50 chip, which offers higher performance than Nvidia GPUs in certain configurations and supports clustering of up to 256 processors.