# SambaNova CEO on Raising $1B at $11B: "It's a Land Grab Right Now"

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/sourcery-6853139/sambanova-ceo-on-raising-1b-at-11b-it-s-a-land-grab-right-now
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/sourcery-6853139/sambanova-ceo-on-raising-1b-at-11b-it-s-a-land-grab-right-now.md
Podcast: [Sourcery](https://stenobird.com/podcast/sourcery-6853139)
Published: 2026-07-17T10:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/sourcery/episodes/SambaNova-CEO-on-Raising-1B-at-11B-Its-a-Land-Grab-Right-Now-e3m6kft
Audio file: https://anchor.fm/s/f192713c/podcast/play/122949565/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2026-6-17%2F428122761-44100-2-5e6367db38fd.mp3
Processing state: not_requested
JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/sourcery-6853139/episodes/sambanova-ceo-on-raising-1b-at-11b-it-s-a-land-grab-right-now
Duration seconds: 3596

## Resource

Rodrigo Liang is the CEO and Co-Founder of SambaNova. The company just announced a first close on a $1B round at an $11B valuation, led by General Atlantic with T. Rowe Price and Capital Group participating. Rodrigo has spent 32 years building chips. We covered the 101 of semiconductors and data centers: what inference is, why it is a different problem than training, and why inference will require orders of magnitude more chips than training. He walks through SambaNova's chip lineup from SN10 to the new SN50, why a 10 kilowatt air-cooled rack changes where AI can be deployed, and why running a trillion parameter model in a single rack matters for agents, latency, and edge. We also covered the era of premium inference, how providers measure revenue per rack, coopetition and traffic routing across Nvidia and AMD, sovereign models, the move back to on-prem, and why tokenmaxxing is the wrong goal. Special thank you to Brex, MongoDB, & AssemblyAI for helping make this RAISE AI Summit mini-series in Paris, France happen. Sourcery covers the people building the future across AI, hardware, and the private and public markets, subscribe for more. Rodrigo Liang: https://x.com/rodrigoliang?s=21 Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea Sourcery: ⁠ https://x.com/sourceryy 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊 YouTube: ⁠https://youtu.be/etod19D9IEg⁠ 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 • Brex —The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery • MongoDB –Millions of developers and more than 65,200+ customers across industries, including ~75% of the Fortune 100, rely on MongoDB for their most important applications. With integrated capabilities for operational data, search, real-time analytics, & AI-powered data…

## Actions

- request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/sourcery-6853139/episodes/sambanova-ceo-on-raising-1b-at-11b-it-s-a-land-grab-right-now/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.
- read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/sourcery-6853139/sambanova-ceo-on-raising-1b-at-11b-it-s-a-land-grab-right-now.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.

A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed.

## Transcript

Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.