AI chip company SambaNova Systems has raised $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation led by General Atlantic, in a first close of its Series F round, with more investors expected to join soon.

“In the coming weeks, a few more investors will arrive and the second lockdown is likely to end,” Rodrigo Liang, CEO and co-founder of SambaNova, told TechCrunch.

The latest round comes about five months after the Palo Alto, California-based startup unveiled its SN50 chip, along with a $350 million Series E in February. SambaNova had also been in acquisition talks with Intel, a deal that valued it at about $1.6 billion, according to a December report by Bloomberg News.

When asked if closing its Series E and F rounds meant SambaNova, founded in 2017, had decided to remain independent, Liang was noncommittal. He said the company continues to attract interest. “They always come up to us.” The door is open to such an exit in this dynamic AI market, the CEO said, but momentum and growth will likely propel the company to “go public at some point.”

SambaNova’s ties with Intel, sponsor since its Series C and participant in this latest round, have deepened. Five months ago, the nine-year-old startup announced a multi-year partnership with Intel to support AI inference development based on Intel’s Xeon chip. The two now jointly develop products and bring them to market together. “That gives us a great relationship with them that allows us to leverage Intel’s scale with the technology we have,” Liang said.

In addition to the new funding, SambaNova said it was selected by JPMorganChase as an “inference infrastructure partner,” with its SN40L and SN50 systems configured to power secure local AI inference at the bank.

“Having JPMorgan Chase decide that they are going to use SambaNova for their inference solution is a big deal,” Liang told TechCrunch. “It sends a message to the banking industry that it is time to not rely completely on cloud services. These banks want heterogeneous services [infrastructure].”

Liang said JPMorgan’s win was a signal for the broader market. Banks “of the caliber of JP Morgan” are now building their own private, secure infrastructure to perform inferences on their most sensitive models, he said, a move he hopes will resonate beyond banking. Companies and governments are “just beginning their AI journey,” Liang continued, and most of the growth so far is concentrated among technology model makers and cutting-edge labs, leaving what he called “a huge amount of revenue” still on the table.

SambaNova launched its SN40L in September 2023, available in the cloud and on-premises starting in November 2023. Its next-generation SN50, unveiled in February 2026, will begin shipping to customers in the second half of 2026, with SoftBank as its first implementation partner, Liang noted.

Liang said SambaNova’s advantage is “premium inference” that runs the largest models and runs them quickly. Current frontier models span trillions of parameters, and he said SambaNova was built specifically to handle them at that scale. The company puts models with several billion parameters on a single rack, which helps them run quickly.

SambaNova sees three types of customers. The first is sovereign clouds, where governments fund local partners to build private clouds, a push in which Liang expects SambaNova to take center stage. The second is neoclouds. The third are companies that build for their own use. In addition to JPMorgan, it also names Saudi Aramco, Intel and other Japanese companies as clients.

SambaNova will use the profits to expand the business and shore up its supply chain in the face of what Liang called an incredible wave of demand. “We are using that capital to secure the supply chain,” he said, describing it as essential to fulfill orders and purchase materials the company needs to deliver over the next 12 months.

Other investors participating in the round include Seligman Ventures, T. Rowe Price Associates and Capital Group. New and existing investors also joined, including A&E Investment, Assam Ventures, Battery Ventures, Cambium Capital, BlackRock, Kabila Capital, QFO Capital, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Vista Equity Partners and Volantis.