Investment
'We are the Best-Funded AI Startup,’ says SambaNova Co-Founder Olukotun Following SoftBank, Intel Infusion
SambaNova's DataS solving the training t
By Tiernan Ray
IN YET ANOTHER SIGN of the rising interest in alternative computing technology, AI systems startup SambaNova Systems said it has received $676 million in a Series D financing from a group of investors that includes the SoftBank Vision Fund of Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group; private equity firm BlackRock; and the Intel Capital arm of chip giant Intel. The new funding round brings the company's total investment to date to over $1 billion. The company is now valued at more than $5 billion. "With this $676 million, we are the best-funded AI startup," said Kunle Olukotun, a professor of computer science at Stanford University, and a co-founder of SambaNova, in an interview with ZDNet via Zoom. SambaNova competes with other heavily funded startups, including Cerebras Systems and Graphcore. 80
May-June 2021
"We're using this round to build our software, hardware, and systems collateral, to challenge the incumbent," said Olukotun. The incumbent, in this case, is Nvidia, whom SambaNova claims to be able to best on benchmark deep learning tasks, with a much-smaller footprint in an equipment rack, and much less power. SambaNova has pioneered a novel approach to moving neural network programs through circuits to train those programs, and a novel chip design, which it calls a data-flow architecture. The company has built computer systems to run the chips and software, called DataScale. The DataScale system is comparable to sixty-four of Nvidia's DGX-2 rack-mounted systems running the A100 GPU, but in only one quarter of a standard telco rack, says SambaNova. And the company claims it can get a 2000-times DAWN
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