Nvidia rival claims DeepSeek world record as it delivers industry-first performance with 95% fewer chips
SambaNova runs DeepSeek-R1 at 198 tokens/sec using 16 custom chips The SN40L RDU chip is reportedly 3X faster, 5X more efficient than GPUs 5X speed boost is promised soon, with 100X capacity by year-end on cloud Chinese AI upstart DeepSeek has very quickly made a name for itself in 2025, with its R1 large-scale open source language model, built for advanced reasoning tasks, showing performance on par with the industry’s top models, while being more cost-efficient. SambaNova Systems, an AI startup founded in 2017 by experts from Sun/Oracle and Stanford University, has now announced what it claims is the world’s fastest deployment of the DeepSeek-R1 671B LLM to date. The company says it has achieved 198 tokens per second, per user, using just 16 custom-built chips, replacing the 40 racks of 320 Nvidia GPUs that would typically be required. Independently verified “Powered by the SN40L RDU chip, SambaNova is the fastest platform running DeepSeek,” said Rodrigo Liang, CEO and c...