US chip startup SambaNova scores billion-dollar funding round

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.