Intel Corporation and AI systems developer SambaNova Systems said Tuesday they plan a multi-year strategic collaboration aimed at delivering high-performance, cost-efficient artificial intelligence inference solutions built on Intel® Xeon®-based infrastructure.
AI is no longer a contest to build the biggest model,” said Rodrigo Liang, co‑founder and CEO of SambaNova. “With the SN50 and our deep collaboration with Intel, the real race is about who can light up entire data centers with AI agents that answer instantly, never stall, and do it at a cost that turns AI from an experiment into the most profitable engine in the cloud.”
The announcement, made concurrently with SambaNova’s disclosure of a $350 million Series E financing round, positions the companies to target large-scale AI model inference workloads across enterprise, cloud, and government environments. Intel Capital, the chipmaker’s investment arm, participated in the funding alongside Vista Equity Partners, Cambium Capital and others.
According to statements, the collaboration will not alter Intel’s existing GPU development plans; rather, it is intended to complement those efforts by enabling heterogeneous infrastructure that combines Intel’s CPUs, networking and memory technologies with SambaNova’s AI systems.
Under the terms outlined, the two companies will work on integrating their technologies to support rack-level inference deployments, systems that execute trained neural networks for reasoning, multimodal tasks and other AI workloads at scale. Intel said the collaboration spans hardware and software integration, reference architectures, and joint engagement with systems integrators and cloud partners.
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SambaNova is using the occasion to highlight its next-generation SN50 AI accelerator, which the company claims will deliver significantly higher throughput and lower cost of ownership compared with incumbent accelerators, although external benchmark data supporting these claims has not been independently published. The first announced customer for the SN50 platform is SoftBank Corp., which will deploy the hardware in data centers in Japan.
“Customers are asking for more choice and more efficient ways to scale AI,” said Kevork Kechichian, EVP, General Manager, Data Center Group, Intel. “By combining Intel’s leadership in compute, networking, and memory with SambaNova’s full-stack AI systems and inference cloud platform, we are delivering a compelling option for organizations looking for GPU alternatives to deploy advanced AI at scale.”
This agreement follows earlier discussions between the two companies about a possible acquisition of SambaNova by Intel that did not materialize. Statements from both sides emphasize a strategic partnership rather than a change in ownership.
