Intel Corp. announced a multi-year strategic collaboration and a significant investment in artificial intelligence (AI) chip startup SambaNova Systems, signaling a shift in strategy after previous negotiations to acquire the company for approximately $1.6 billion reportedly stalled.
The partnership, announced Tuesday, coincides with SambaNova’s $350 million Series E funding round. The financing was led by Vista Equity Partners and Cambium Capital, with “strong participation” from Intel Capital, alongside other heavyweight investors SoftBank Group, Temasek, and T. Rowe Price Associates.
The collaboration is a clear move by Intel to regain footing in an AI hardware market currently dominated by NVIDIA Corp. While NVIDIA’s GPUs remain the industry standard for models like ChatGPT, Intel has tumbled through four consecutive years of revenue decline. By joining forces with SambaNova, Intel aims to offer a full-stack alternative for enterprise AI.
Under the agreement, SambaNova will integrate Intel’s Xeon CPUs and networking technologies into its vertically integrated AI cloud platform. The two companies will engage in joint sales and marketing efforts, leveraging Intel’s massive global distribution channels to accelerate the adoption of SambaNova’s hardware.
“Customers are asking for more choice and more efficient ways to scale AI,” said Kevork Kechichian, head of Intel’s Data Center Group. “By combining Intel’s leadership in compute with SambaNova’s inference cloud, we are delivering a compelling option for organizations looking for GPU alternatives.”
Anchoring the new alliance is SambaNova’s latest chip, the SN50. Marketed as the “most efficient chip for agentic AI,” the startup claims the SN50 delivers five times more compute per accelerator than previous generations, one-third the cost for agentic AI workloads compared to traditional GPUs, and four times more network bandwidth, allowing customers to cluster up to 256 processors.
“Why this partnership? You don’t run production Inference workloads on $30K processors,” tech analyst Jack Gold said, assessing the deal. “That opens up the market to the players who can provide enough processing power at an attractive cost per AI transaction to be successful. And that includes the efforts of the major hyperscalers (e.g., AWS, Google, Microsoft) who are building their own inference optimized processors.”
SambaNova CEO Rodrigo Liang said the race has shifted from building the largest models to achieving instant inference at a sustainable cost. Japanese investment giant SoftBank has already signed on as the first customer to deploy the SN50 in its next-generation data centers.
The deal highlights the intertwined leadership between the two firms. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan has served as SambaNova’s executive chairman since its founding in 2017 and was an early investor through his venture firms, Walden International and Celesta Capital.
To avoid conflicts of interest, an Intel spokesperson confirmed that Tan recused himself from discussions regarding the collaboration. While neither company would comment on the failed acquisition talks, a SambaNova representative stated that a merger is “not in discussion at this stage.”
For Intel, the partnership offers a pragmatic path forward: rather than a costly and potentially scrutinized acquisition, it gains a high-performance ally to help light up data centers with its own CPUs and networking gear, mounting a renewed challenge to NVIDIA’s silicon crown.
