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 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊YouTube: ⁠https://youtu.be/etod19D9IEg⁠𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒• 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 retrieval, MongoDB helps organizations everywhere move faster, innovate more efficiently, & simplify complex architectures. https://mongodb.com/ai• AssemblyAI–Millions of developers use AssemblyAI to power their voice ai applications and features. One API gives you access to best-in-class speech-to-text, voice agent, and speech understanding models for both pre-recorded and real-time audio.  Granola, ClickUp & HeyGen are scaling with AssemblyAI - get $50 of free credits today at http://AssemblyAI.com/sourcery𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

Rodrigo Liang , Co-Founder & CEO at SambaNova Systems

SambaNova’s Series F : $1B raise at an $11 billion valuation

The Inference problem nobody saw coming

SambaNova's chip evolution

Running a trillion-parameter model on a single rack

Do $100 billion data centers actually make sense?

What "premium inference" really means

Speed is about to become AI's biggest price tag

Starlink, edge computing, and AI reaching every corner of the planet

Working alongside NVIDIA and rival chipmakers

How customers actually measure inference performance

The biggest bottlenecks in AI's global land grab

Justifying the billion-dollar AI valuations

Why SambaNova refuses to build its own cloud

The "AI sovereignty" debate

Data privacy fears are driving the return to on-prem AI

How to actually get ROI out of AI spend

The one question every business should be asking about AI

The mentors and lessons behind a 32-year career in chips