Rodrigo Liang

Co-Founder & CEO SambaNova

Last Reviewed: September 29, 2026

Executive Summary

Rodrigo Liang is co-founder and chief executive of SambaNova, the company he started in Palo Alto in 2017 with Stanford professors Kunle Olukotun and Christopher Ré. SambaNova builds its own AI processors, systems and cloud service, and it has staked its business on fast, low-cost inference, the stage at which trained models are put to work. In July 2026 it completed the first close of a $1 billion Series F led by General Atlantic, at an $11 billion post-money valuation. Liang is a processor engineer by background. Before SambaNova he led large chip design teams at Sun Microsystems and Oracle, and SambaNova’s strategy reflects that: it competes with GPU incumbents with purpose-built silicon rather than software alone.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded SambaNova in 2017 and is its CEO; listed in SEC Form D filings as an executive officer and director of SambaNova Systems, Inc.
• Raised a $1 billion first close of a Series F at an $11 billion valuation in July 2026, led by General Atlantic with Seligman Ventures and T. Rowe Price Associates, as JPMorganChase selected SambaNova for on-premises AI inference.
• Launched the SN50 AI chip in February 2026, together with more than $350 million in Series E financing and a planned multi-year collaboration with Intel. SoftBank Corp. was named as the first SN50 customer.
• Led some of the industry’s largest processor teams at Sun Microsystems and Oracle, building high-performance processors for enterprise systems.
• Began his career at Hewlett-Packard; holds BS and MS degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University.

Professional Journey

Liang studied electrical engineering at Stanford University, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and began his career at Hewlett-Packard. He went on to spend much of his career designing enterprise processors, leading some of the industry’s largest engineering teams at Sun Microsystems and at Oracle. SambaNova puts that experience at more than two decades in semiconductor engineering.

In 2017 he co-founded SambaNova in Palo Alto with two Stanford academics: Kunle Olukotun, a pioneer of chip multiprocessor design who had founded Afara Websystems (acquired by Sun in 2002), and Christopher Ré, a computer scientist working on machine learning systems. The company designs a dataflow processor it calls the RDU and builds rack-scale systems and a cloud service on top of it. SEC Form D filings from 2018 to 2021 name him as an executive officer and director, including a 2021 filing reporting about $678 million raised.

In recent years SambaNova has concentrated on inference and on selling to enterprises, “neoclouds” and governments seeking sovereign AI capacity. In February 2026 it unveiled the SN50 chip, which it says is up to five times faster than competing chips and three times cheaper to run than GPUs for agentic AI. It announced the chip alongside a $350 million-plus Series E and a planned multi-year collaboration with Intel, and named SoftBank Corp. as the first customer. In July 2026 SambaNova completed the first close of a $1 billion Series F at an $11 billion post-money valuation, led by General Atlantic, and announced JPMorganChase as an inference infrastructure customer. Liang said the valuation “highlights the central role that fast inference now plays in the enterprise AI stack.”

His argument is that AI is no longer a race to build the biggest model but a question of running agents at a cost that makes them profitable. On SambaNova’s own site he says customers “are no longer asking whether AI works” but how to run it “securely, profitably and at scale”. The company’s chairman is Lip-Bu Tan, who is also chief executive of Intel.

Education

Stanford University

MS, Electrical Engineering

Stanford University

BS, Electrical Engineering