Reports that Intel is considering acquiring AI semiconductor startup “Sambanova Systems” indicate that the company is trying to make a new move to make a comeback in the AI era.
🟧 Intel considers acquiring AI chip emerging “Sambanova”
It was reported that Intel is considering acquiring AI semiconductor startup SambaNova Systems. Preliminary negotiations have already begun, and the acquisition is likely to be below its valuation at the time of the 2021 financing (about $5 billion).
- Sambanova is an AI chip development company founded in 2017 by professors at Stanford University, headquartered in Palo Alto, California.
- The company’s flagship product, the SN40L, uses a unique Reconfigurable Dataflow Architecture and specializes in high-speed inference for large language models (LLMs) and generative AI.
- Unlike NVIDIA GPUs, they are characterized by significantly improving power efficiency by pre-optimizing the flow of computing and minimizing data movement.
🟧AI chip competition is back in the era of “design power”
The background of this move is the intensification of competition in the AI hardware market. Currently, much of the learning and inference of generative AI is dominated by NVIDIA GPUs, but GPUs are general-purpose designs, making it difficult to optimize for each AI model.
Intel is re-challenging the AI market with its self-developed Gaudi series, but the reality is that the gap with NVIDIA in terms of software ecosystem and performance is still large. Sambanova’s data-flowing architecture is promising in that it can “dynamically optimize” hardware specifically for AI models, and could complement Intel’s AI strategy.
In addition, since 2024, AI-specific chip companies such as Cerebras and Groq have also emerged, and the AI accelerator market is taking on a new battle for the “third option, neither CPU nor GPU”.
🟧Summary
Intel’s consideration of acquiring Sambanova symbolizes that the battle for leadership in AI chip development has entered a new phase. There is a possibility that it will open a wind hole in the composition of the GPU-strong system, and if it is realized, the power map of the AI semiconductor market will change significantly.
It will be interesting to see how Sambanova’s technology will fit into Intel’s AI strategy. While the involvement of CEO Rip Vu Tan in both companies is curious, if it is a pure integration focused on technical synergies, it could greatly boost Intel’s reinstatement in the AI field.
