Supermicro will buy 10,000 SambaNova chips to write AI answers alongside Nvidia; gross margin fell to 12.7%
In the same week, the two Nvidia box sellers gave SambaNova and Groq the same job: the decode step in racks that carry Nvidia silicon and the OEM's own badge, with no published price, spec or end customer. Supermicro committed 10,000 chips against a quarter of 12.7 percent margins and $434 million of cash burn.
Vincent Jiang · 2 min read
Supermicro+5.53% — Supermicro, up 5.53 percent today, the San Jose server maker that builds most of Nvidia's+3.96% — Nvidia, up 3.96 percent today AI boxes, said this week it will buy 10,000 SN50 chips from SambaNova$11B — SambaNova, private, latest valuation $11B, the San Jose AI chip company founded in 2017, and build inference racks that split the work: Nvidia GPUs read the prompt in the prefill step, SambaNova's Reconfigurable Dataflow Units write the answer in the decode step 12. The racks carry Supermicro's badge inside its Data Center Building Block Solutions line, and Supermicro handles integration, testing, delivery and on-site service 13.
Days earlier at GTC Berlin, Dell, the other big Nvidia box seller, added its first Groq$3.5B — Groq, private, latest valuation $3.5B rack: the PowerEdge XE9810, sixteen direct-liquid-cooled trays of Groq 3 LPUs, shipping in the first quarter of 2027 6.
The order has no price, no spec and no customer
Neither company published what one SN50 costs, what it delivers in tokens per second, or who buys the first rack 1. SambaNova's own benchmark, 5x faster than "competitive chips" at 3x lower total cost of ownership, names no comparator 1. The markets targeted first, neoclouds and sovereign clouds, have not ordered publicly 2.
What landed instead is the buyer's balance sheet. Supermicro's quarter ended September 30 showed net sales of $19.946 billion, four times the year-ago $5.018 billion, with gross profit of $2.541 billion, a 12.7 percent margin against 17.5 percent the quarter before 45. Inventories rose to $15.054 billion from $12.896 billion in three months 4. Operating activities used $434.0 million 4. One customer was 44.0 percent of quarterly sales 4. In June the company sold stock for about $1.4 billion combined 4.
Supermicro's sales quadrupled in a year
Data
| Net sales | |
|---|---|
| Q3 '25 | $5.02B |
| Q4 '25 | $12.68B |
| Q1 '26 | $10.24B |
| Q2 '26 | $11.12B |
| Q3 '26 | $19.95B |
Gross margin swung from 6.3% to 17.5% and back to 12.7% in five quarters
Data
| Gross margin | |
|---|---|
| Q3 '25 | 9.3% |
| Q4 '25 | 6.3% |
| Q1 '26 | 9.9% |
| Q2 '26 | 17.5% |
| Q3 '26 | 12.7% |
The 10,000 RDUs are inventory bought ahead of demand the sources do not show. That is the deal's real shape.
Decode has other bidders
The decode slot SambaNova just took is contested. Qualcomm+4.70% — Qualcomm, up 4.70 percent today said on its November 4 earnings call that decode is the workload drawing the strongest customer feedback for its custom data-center silicon, and guided its first data-center quarter past $650 million 7.
Nvidia itself paid $13 billion for Groq to add a fast-inference accelerator 8. A paying customer told The Inference that a fast token sells for three to five times a standard one 8, so the slot is worth money to whoever holds it. The challengers are not being embraced; they are being rented.
Three tells decide whether the order is real
First deployments go to neoclouds and sovereign clouds, with enterprise sales to follow 1. The tells: a named end customer, a published throughput figure for SN50, and whether Supermicro's gross margin holds near 12.7 percent while it carries the inventory 1. None of the three exists today.
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More about NVIDIA
NVDA · Fiscal Q2 2027Revenue rose 106% to $96.2B, 92.5% of it from Data Center, “driven by the ramp of our Blackwell Ultra infrastructure”. Gains on equity stakes of $7.8B lifted net income to $59.7B.
Show as a table
| Line | Value |
|---|---|
| Revenue | $96.2B |
| Gross margin | 75.0% |
| Operating margin | 66.2% |
| Net income | $59.7B |
| Hyperscale | $48.7B |
| AI clouds & enterprise | $40.3B |
| Data Center | $89.0B |
| Edge Computing | $7.2B |
| Gross profit | $72.1B |
| Cost of revenue | $24.1B |
| Other income | $7.8B |
| Operating income | $63.7B |
| Operating expenses | $8.4B |
| Tax | $11.8B |
| R&D | $7.1B |
| SG&A | $1.4B |
