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SambaNova Systems’ indicative private-market share price has delivered 3.6x NVIDIA’s stock returns, creating a direct AI-chip challenger narrative.
The article
This Private AI Chip Startup Has Crushed NVIDIA's Stock Gains With 3.6X Returns SambaNova Systems, a privately held artificial intelligence chip startup, has seen its indicative share price surge more than threefold over the past year, dramatically outpacing NVIDIA Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) as investors look for alternatives to the dominant supplier of AI computing hardware. SambaNova’s Forge Price reached $70.13 per share on Oct. 12, up 259.27% over one year, according to Forge Global. That puts its indicative share price at roughly 3.6 times its level a year earlier. By comparison, NVIDIA delivered a 23.73% one-year total return as of Oct. 12, including dividends and other distributions, according to data from Perplexity Finance. SambaNova’s percentage gain was more than 10 times NVIDIA’s return over the period. The comparison comes as investors pour money into the computing infrastructure needed to train and run increasingly capable AI models. Read Also: SoftBank Wants up to $100 Billion From Gulf Investors for AI — but Its $65 Billion OpenAI Bet Is Raising Eyebrows Competing for AI Compute SambaNova and NVIDIA compete in AI computing, particularly in the market for hardware used to run AI models, known as inference. However, the companies have different approaches to the market. NVIDIA dominates the AI accelerator market with its graphics processing units, networking equipment and software ecosystem. SambaNova is developing specialized chips called reconfigurable dataflow units, or RDUs, designed to handle demanding AI workloads, including inference for large language models. The companies’ technologies can also complement each other. In June, SambaNova demonstrated a system that used NVIDIA’s B200 GPUs to process incoming prompts and SambaNova’s SN40 chips to generate responses. The company said the combined architecture delivered twice the inference speed of a B200-only configuration, according to SambaNova. Private-Market Pricing Surges Forge’s latest data puts SambaNova’s implied valuation at approximately $6.07 billion. That is below the $11 billion post-money valuation reported for the company’s Series F financing in July, when SambaNova announced a funding round that included an initial close of more than $800 million, according to Forge’s funding history and TechCrunch. The gap highlights an important distinction between private-market pricing and formal fundraising valuations. Forge Price is a derived estimate based on private-market data, not a continuously traded stock quote or a guarantee of the price investors can obtain in a transaction. SambaNova’s share-price rally nevertheless points to investor interest in alternatives to conventional GPU-based AI infrastructure as inference workloads grow. NVIDIA remains a vastly larger business, with a market capitalization of approximately $5.45 trillion as of Sept. 23, according to a report from the Motley Fool. As demand for AI computing continues to grow, SambaNova’s rally highlights investor interest in alternatives to NVIDIA’s dominant GPU platform. Whether that momentum translates into lasting gains will depend on the company’s ability to turn demand for its specialized chips into broader adoption and commercial growth. Photo: Shutterstock Read Also: Blackstone Raises $1 Billion For Private Credit Continuation Fund As Secondaries Boom