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(Sharecast News) - Intel has announced it is taking part in a $350m investment round in SambaNova as part of a multi-year collaboration that will see the AI chip startup compete with industry leader Nvidia.
The announcement comes months after speculation that the American chip giant was close to acquiring SambaNova, whose executive chairman is also Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan.
Instead, the $350m investment come from new and existing investors and is part of a Series E financing to expand manufacturing and cloud capacity, California-based SambaNova announced on Tuesday. It is unclear how much of the total Intel is putting up.
To quickly scale SambaNova's new SN50 AI chip, which it said runs at a max speed five times faster than competitive chips, it is partnering with Intel to adopt the latter's server chips and graphics cards.
"AI is no longer a contest to build the biggest model," said SambaNova co-founder and chief executive Rodrigo Liang.
"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."
Intel shares were up 1.9% at $44.47 in pre-market trading.
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