US chip startup SambaNova scores $1-billion funding round

Paris: American AI chip startup SambaNova said Wednesday it had been valued at $11 billion, in a $1 billion fundraising round announced at the Raise Summit industry event in Paris.

The company’s juiced valuation highlights the growing importance of its specialist area of AI “inference” — the process by which AI models generate a response to users’ everyday queries — over the arduous and costly effort of “training” new models from scratch.

Founded in 2017 and backed by US semiconductor heavyweight Intel, California-based SambaNova will use the latest cash infusion to “continue investing across chips, systems, software, and full-stack AI infrastructure,” the company said in a statement.