# Rodrigo Liang

> Rodrigo Liang is the co-founder and CEO of SambaNova Systems, an AI infrastructure company he built from the ground up in 2017 alongside Stanford professors Kunle Olukotun and Chris Ré. Born in Taipei, raised in Brazil, and trained in electrical engineering at Stanford, Liang spent two decades designing high-performance processors at Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and Oracle before betting that the entire computing paradigm for AI needed to be reimagined. SambaNova's Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit (RDU) is the architectural expression of that conviction - chips designed around data movement rather than instructions - and in February 2026 the company announced the SN50, claiming it runs agentic AI 5x faster than competing chips at 3x lower cost, backed by $350M in Series E funding and a strategic partnership with Intel.

- **Role:** Co-Founder & CEO at SambaNova Systems
- **Organizations:** SambaNova Systems, Oracle Corporation, Sun Microsystems, Afara Websystems, inSilicon, Hewlett-Packard, World Economic Forum (Agenda Contributor)
- **From:** Taipei, Taiwan
- **Nationality:** Brazilian-American
- **Education:** Master of Science, Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, Bachelor of Science, Electrical Engineering, Stanford University
- **Known for:** Co-founded SambaNova Systems, securing over $1.45B in total funding, Invented and commercialized the Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit (RDU) architecture for AI workloads, Led development of the SN50 chip, claimed to be the fastest AI chip for agentic inference

## Career timeline

- **1993** — Joined Hewlett-Packard as Hardware Manager
- **2000** — Moved to inSilicon as Director of Engineering
- **2001** — Joined Afara Websystems as Director of Engineering, focused on multi-core processor design
- **2002** — Sun Microsystems acquired Afara Websystems; Liang became Director/VP of UltraSPARC engineering, leading Niagara multi-core chip development
- **2010** — Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems; Liang promoted to Senior Vice President of SPARC Processor and ASIC Development
- **2017** — Left Oracle; co-founded SambaNova Systems in November 2017 with Stanford professors Kunle Olukotun and Chris Ré
- **2018** — SambaNova emerged from stealth with $56M Series A funding led by Walden International and GV
- **2019** — SambaNova raised $250M Series B
- **2021** — SambaNova raised $676M Series D at a $5B+ valuation
- **2024** — Launched SambaNova Cloud; announced SN40L chip; pivoted strategic focus from AI training to inference
- **2025** — Announced three sovereign AI cloud partnerships: SCX (Australia), Infercom (Germany), Argyll (UK); presented at RAISE Conference in Paris
- **2026** — Unveiled SN50 chip (5x faster than competition, 3x lower TCO than GPUs); announced Intel strategic collaboration and $350M+ Series E funding; SoftBank became first SN50 customer

## Achievements

- Co-founded SambaNova Systems, securing over $1.45B in total funding
- Invented and commercialized the Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit (RDU) architecture for AI workloads
- Led development of the SN50 chip, claimed to be the fastest AI chip for agentic inference
- Brokered multi-year strategic collaboration with Intel for the SN50 rollout
- Shipped 12 major SPARC processors and ASICs during tenure at Oracle
- Helped lead Sun Microsystems' development of the world's first multi-core processors (Niagara line)
- Contributor to the World Economic Forum AI agenda
- Featured speaker at RAISE Conference 2025 in Paris, TEDAI San Francisco 2025

## Latest updates

- **2026-02** — SambaNova unveiled the SN50 AI chip, announced a multi-year strategic collaboration with Intel, and closed $350M+ Series E funding led by Vista Equity Partners. SoftBank Corp. became the first SN50 customer, deploying the chip in Japanese data centers.
- **2025-11** — Remained publicly optimistic about sovereign AI partnerships, describing the agentic AI revolution as requiring 10X to 100X more inference compute. Company valuation was approximately $2.13B.
- **2025-10** — SambaNova announced sovereign AI cloud partnerships with SCX (Australia), Infercom (Germany), and Argyll (UK), positioning itself as a privacy-focused national AI infrastructure provider.
- **2025-09** — Rodrigo Liang appeared at RAISE Conference 2025 in Paris alongside Thomas Wolf, Tony Kim, and Arjun Kharpal, opening the conference with a panel on open source, fast inference, and the agentic revolution.
- **2025-06** — Spoke at TEDAI San Francisco 2025 about the future of AI infrastructure.

## Links

- Website: https://sambanova.ai
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/rodrigo-liang
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/RodrigoLiang
- YouTube: https://sambanova.ai/videos/rodrigo-liang-on-agentic-ai

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/rodrigo-liang
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-05-11