SambaNova CEO on Raising $1B at $11B: "It's a Land Grab Right Now"

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.

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Rodrigo Liang: https://x.com/rodrigoliang?s=21 

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 

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(00:00) Rodrigo Liang , Co-Founder & CEO at SambaNova Systems

(00:59) SambaNova’s Series F : $1B raise at an $11 billion valuation

(03:00) The Inference problem nobody saw coming

(04:52) SambaNova's chip evolution

(07:19) Running a trillion-parameter model on a single rack

(11:00) Do $100 billion data centers actually make sense?

(14:14) What "premium inference" really means

(18:28) Speed is about to become AI's biggest price tag

(20:43) Starlink, edge computing, and AI reaching every corner of the planet

(24:27) Working alongside NVIDIA and rival chipmakers

(27:49) How customers actually measure inference performance

(32:07) The biggest bottlenecks in AI's global land grab

(35:12) Justifying the billion-dollar AI valuations

(37:53) Why SambaNova refuses to build its own cloud

(41:03) The "AI sovereignty" debate

(43:48) Data privacy fears are driving the return to on-prem AI

(47:55) How to actually get ROI out of AI spend

(51:16) The one question every business should be asking about AI

(56:09) The mentors and lessons behind a 32-year career in chips 

(58:02) Unveiling SambaNova's newest chip, the SN50