SAMBANOVA RAISES $1 BILLION AND JPMORGANCHASE PICKS IT OVER NVIDIA FOR ON-SITE AI INFERENCE SambaNova Systems closed the first tranche of its Series F on July 8, pulling in $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation just five months after its last major fundraise. General Atlantic led the round, with BlackRock, Intel Capital, and the Qatar Investment Authority among those writing checks. The headline number is significant on its own. But the real signal is who they are now selling to. SambaNova disclosed that JPMorganChase has selected its hardware as an inference infrastructure partner, with SambaNova’s SN40L and upcoming SN50 chips set to run secure, on-premises AI workloads inside one of the largest financial institutions in the world. When a bank of that size routes its most sensitive AI processing through your hardware, that is not a speculative bet. That is an enterprise validation with real stakes. The SN50 chip, unveiled in February 2026, was built specifically for inference, the part of the AI pipeline where pre-trained models respond to actual user queries. NVIDIA built its empire on training. Inference is where the commercial money actually flows, and the market for it is enormous and still widening. SoftBank is SambaNova’s first deployment partner for the SN50, with shipments expected in the second half of 2026. The AI chip race is not a two-company story anymore. Keywords: SambaNova funding, AI inference chip, JPMorganChase AI, NVIDIA competitor, AI infrastructure