Intel Teams Up With AI Chip Startup That Its New CEO Lip-Bu Tan Is Invested In

Intel is participating in a $350 million funding round for SambaNova, and its new CEO, Lip-Bu Tan is an early investor in the startup.

• The two companies announced that their offering will provide customers with a powerful alternative to GPU-centric AI inference solutions.
• As part of the deal, SambaNova will be built on Intel Xeon‑based infrastructure and optimized for large language and multimodal models.
• The two companies will also combine SambaNova’s systems with Intel’s CPUs, accelerators, and networking technologies to provide scalable, production‑ready inference capacity.

Intel Corp. (INTC) on Tuesday announced a partnership with AI chip startup SambaNova to deliver high-performance, cost-efficient AI inference solutions.

Intel is participating in a $350 million funding round for SambaNova, and its new CEO, Lip-Bu Tan is an early investor in the startup. He’s also SambaNova’s Chairman.

“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,” said Intel’s EVP, General Manager, Data Center Group, Kevork Kechichian.

Intel shares were up nearly 2% in Tuesday’s pre-market trade. Retail sentiment on Stocktwits around the company trended in the ‘bearish’ territory at the time of writing.

Intel, SambaNova Strike Multi-Year Deal

The two companies announced that their offering will provide customers with a powerful alternative to GPU-centric AI inference solutions. Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) are among the top companies currently offering GPU-focused AI compute.

As part of the deal, SambaNova will be built on Intel Xeon‑based infrastructure and optimized for large language and multimodal models. The two companies will also combine SambaNova’s systems with Intel’s CPUs, accelerators, and networking technologies to provide scalable, production‑ready inference capacity.

Intel will also jointly co-sell and market these solutions to its global enterprise, cloud, and partner channels to accelerate the adoption of this offering.

Intel CEO Tan’s venture firm, Walden International, is among the early investors in SambaNova, according to a CNBC report.

SambaNova Says Its New Chip Is More Powerful Than Nvidia’s B200

SambaNova took the wraps off its new AI chip, the SN50. The company said that this chip is more powerful than Nvidia’s B200.

The company stated that the maximum speed of the Llama 3.3 70B model on Nvidia’s B200 is 184 tokens per second per user, while its SN50 chip can process up to 895 tokens per second per user.

SoftBank will be the first customer to deploy SambaNova’s SN50 within its next‑generation AI data centers in Japan. The deployment will power low‑latency inference services for sovereign and enterprise customers across Asia‑Pacific, the company said.

How Did Stocktwits Users React?

One user said that the SambaNova partnership is “very good news” for Intel.

However, another user stated that this would have been bigger news for Intel had it bought SambaNova.

INTC stock is up 18% year-to-date and 75% over the past 12 months.

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