SambaNova Systems Welcomes Semiconductor Industry Veteran, Lip-Bu Tan, in an Operational Role as Executive Chairman
Source: Business Wire
In addition to running Intel, Lip-Bu Tan is chairman of artificial intelligence chipmaker SambaNova, which he first invested in eight years ago. Now Intel is pumping money into the startup as it tries to take on industry leader Nvidia.
SambaNova, a maker of chips for running generative AI models, has agreed to adopt Intel server chips and graphics cards in a multiyear collaboration, according to a Tuesday release. Intel is also participating in a $350 million funding round, after initially investing in SambaNova in 2019.
For years, Nvidia’s graphics processing units have been the silicon of choice for AI model companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, which kickstarted the AI boom with the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. While Nvidia has been the leading beneficiary of the AI craze and is now the world’s most valuable publicly traded company, Intel’s revenue has declined for four straight years.
Intel is now assembling its own graphics card, Tan said at a Cisco event earlier this month. The stock is up 75% in the past year, largely thanks to massive investments from the U.S. government and Nvidia.
But to become a real player in the AI chip market, Intel needs help. The company previously looked at buying SambaNova for $1.6 billion but talks fell apart, Bloomberg reported in January.
SambaNova counts Hugging Face, Meta and major AI labs as customers. With the new partnership, Intel and SambaNova will work together on sales and marketing to boost adoption.
“We’re not doing all this overnight,” Rodrigo Liang, SambaNova’s co-founder and CEO, told CNBC in an interview. “It’s not like we’re showing up tomorrow with all these things ready, but it’s something that we are doing some good planning work to make sure that we’re actually working this out, and then we’re delivering more streamlined solutions.”
Intel and SambaNova declined to comment on whether the two companies discussed an acquisition.
Tan became SambaNova’s chairman in 2017. Walden International, the venture firm he started in 1987, placed an early bet on the startup, alongside Google’s venture arm. Tan recused himself from discussions about the collaboration, an Intel spokesperson said.
SambaNova is touting a new chip called the SN50 that Liang said delivers higher performance than the GPUs in Nvidia’s B200 systems, based on Blackwell, and provides more computing power for the same price. The company says customers can connect up to 256 of the processors together.
SoftBank, a leading investor in OpenAI, will deploy the SN50 and is an existing SambaNova customer, the startup said.
Liang said SambaNova is well aware of Nvidia’s dominance, but he sees room for other players.
“I think we have to be realistic about the fact that Nvidia is pervasive today, as far as kind of what people like to use, but there are new technologies that are coming out that are going to run those really, really efficiently,” he said. “And if you route that traffic in a heterogeneous environment, like most people are starting to do, you know you’re going to get much better value out of the infrastructure.”
SambaNova wants to expand its own cloud for running AI models and is looking to sell clusters that companies can run in their data centers.
SambaNova’s other investors include private equity firm Vista Equity Partners, Battery Ventures, Cambium Capital, Qatar Investment Authority, Seligman Ventures and T. Rowe Price.
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