According to sources close to Wired , Intel has signed a new agreement with SambaNova, an AI chip startup, to acquire the company under undisclosed terms. The signed term sheet is non-binding, meaning it can be canceled under any condition, and a final deal has not yet been reached. Intel's current CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, has been serving as chairman of the board for SambaNova Systems, effectively giving him insider knowledge of the company's operations. The company has raised a total of $1.14 billion in funding as of early 2025, meaning that a lot of investors have shown confidence into its technology.

SambaNova develops AI chips based on its Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit (RDU), which takes a novel approach to enable trillion-parameter inference on its SambaRack rack-scale solutions. The latest 4th generation RDU features 1,040 RDU cores, 653 TeraFLOPS of BF16 (similar to FP16) compute, 520 MB of on-chip memory, 64 GB of HBM3, and is paired with a 1.5 TB external DDR memory pool to accommodate large language models for inference. Since it is a private company, we don't have sales figures officially published anywhere.