SambaNova Shares Slide 18% In A Month As AI Chip Startup Trades Well Below Latest Valuation

SambaNova Systems is seeing its private-market valuation come under pressure just months after the AI chip startup secured a $1 billion funding round at an $11 billion valuation.

SambaNova’s Forge Price has fallen 18.18% over the past month to $66.92, according to Forge Global data. The move puts the company’s implied Forge valuation at roughly $5.79 billion, well below the valuation established in its latest financing.

The decline comes after a huge run for the company earlier this year.

SambaNova raised $1 billion in a Series F round in July at $127.10 per share, valuing the company at $11 billion post-money, TechCrunch reported. The round was led by General Atlantic and included investors such as BlackRock, Intel Capital, T. Rowe Price Associates and Vista Equity Partners.

At $66.92, SambaNova’s Forge Price is now about 47% below the price investors paid in that funding round. 

AI Chip Bet Gets More Complicated

SambaNova’s valuation has climbed dramatically in 2026 as investors have poured money into companies developing alternatives to Nvidia’s dominant AI infrastructure.

The company raised roughly $350 million in February, unveiling its SN50 chip and shifting more aggressively toward AI inference, the computing required to generate responses from AI models after they have been trained.

SambaNova’s decline comes as the economics of AI infrastructure have become an increasingly important part of the investment story. Rather than focusing exclusively on the cost of training increasingly large models, companies are looking at the expense of serving those models to users at scale.

SambaNova CEO Rodrigo Liang has increasingly positioned the company around that market.

In a September interview with CNBC, Liang argued that inference will become a central part of the AI economy, emphasizing the cost of serving individual AI requests. He said SambaNova infrastructure can achieve roughly a six-month payback period and that its systems can reduce inference costs by using existing data-center infrastructure.

JPMorgan, Intel Add To The Story

SambaNova also has several major corporate relationships that could test whether demand for specialized AI infrastructure can translate into commercial growth.

In July, JPMorgan Chase selected SambaNova as an inference-infrastructure partner, with SambaNova’s SN40L and SN50 systems intended to support secure, on-premises AI workloads at the bank. 

Intel has also deepened its relationship with SambaNova. Reuters reported in April that Intel planned to invest an additional $15 million, following a $35 million investment earlier in the year. The additional investment would raise Intel’s stake to about 9%. 

The combination of strategic partnerships and fresh capital gives SambaNova significant resources to compete in AI infrastructure.

For now, SambaNova’s private-market performance leaves investors with two very different valuation benchmarks: the $11 billion price set in its July funding round and the roughly $5.79 billion valuation implied by Forge. Whether the gap narrows remains to be seen.

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