SambaNova Systems has announced it is laying off 77 employees, around 15 percent of its 500-strong workforce.

The cuts occurred on April 22, according to a WARN notice filed by the company with the state Employment Development Department in California.

In a statement to EE Times, the company said the layoffs resulted from a decision to pivot its focus away from training workloads and being an AI cloud services provider.

“This past week, SambaNova made changes to align with today’s market conditions and the transition we’ve seen from model training to fine-tuning and inference,” a company spokesperson told the news outlet.

“We’ve quickly shifted to focus on delivering cloud-first solutions that help enterprises and developers deploy open-source models at scale. As part of this, we made the difficult decision to part ways with [around] 75 employees and recalibrated the team to support our next stage growth.”

DCD has reached out to SambaNova for comment.

Founded in 2017 and headquartered in Palo Alto, California, SambaNova’s Suite is touted as an on-prem or cloud-based offering that allows companies to train their own generative AI models based on popular foundation models.

The company first unveiled its SambaNova Cloud in September 2024. It provides cloud-based AI inference services using the company’s SN40L AI chip, launched in September 2023 and capable of running models with up to five trillion parameters.