SambaNova CEO on Raising $1B at $11B: "It's a Land Grab Right Now"
About this episode
Rodrigo Liang discusses SambaNova's recent funding and the implications for AI and semiconductor technology.
Rodrigo Liang is the CEO and Co-Founder of SambaNova. The company just announced a first close on a $1B round at an $11B valuation, led by General Atlantic with T. Rowe Price and Capital Group participating. Rodrigo has spent 32 years building chips. We covered the 101 of semiconductors and data centers: what inference is, why it is a different problem than training, and why inference will require orders of magnitude more chips than training. He walks through SambaNova's chip lineup from SN10 to the new SN50, why a 10 kilowatt air-cooled rack changes where AI can be deployed, and why running a trillion parameter model in a single rack matters for agents, latency, and edge. We also covered the era of premium inference, how providers measure revenue per rack, coopetition and traffic routing across Nvidia and AMD, sovereign models, the move back to on-prem, and why tokenmaxxing is the wrong goal. Special thank you to Brex, MongoDB, & AssemblyAI for helping make this RAISE AI Summit mini-series in Paris, France happen. Sourcery covers the people building the future across AI, hardware, and the private and public markets, subscribe for more. Rodrigo Liang…
Sponsors
Brex, MongoDB, AssemblyAI
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