SambaNova Systems

SambaNova Systems is an AI hardware and platform company that designs custom AI processors using a reconfigurable dataflow architecture (RDU — Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit). SambaNova's approach differs from GPU-based computing by using a dataflow architecture specifically optimized for AI workloads.

SambaNova offers both hardware systems and a cloud platform (SambaNova Cloud) that provides fast inference on popular open-source models. The company has gained attention for achieving very fast inference speeds on models like Llama, competing with other AI inference providers on speed and cost.

In the compute layer, SambaNova represents the custom silicon approach to AI infrastructure — purpose-built chips designed from the ground up for AI workloads, challenging the NVIDIA GPU dominance with an alternative architecture.