We provide a new upper bound for sampling numbers $$(g_n)_{n\in \mathbb {N}}$$ ( g n ) n ∈ N associated with the compact embedding of a separable reproducing kernel Hilbert space into the space of square integrable functions. There are universal constants $$C,c>0$$ C , c > 0 (which are specified in the paper) such that $$\begin{aligned} g^2_n \le \frac{C\log (n)}{n}\sum \limits _{k\ge \lfloor cn \rfloor } \sigma _k^2,\quad n\ge 2, \end{aligned}$$ g n 2 ≤ C log ( n ) n ∑ k ≥ ⌊ c n ⌋ σ k 2 , n ≥ 2 , where $$(\sigma _k)_{k\in \mathbb {N}}$$ ( σ k ) k ∈ N is the sequence of singular numbers (approximation numbers) of the Hilbert–Schmidt embedding $$\mathrm {Id}:H(K) \rightarrow L_2(D,\varrho _D)$$ Id : H ( K ) → L 2 ( D , ϱ D ) . The algorithm which realizes the bound is a least squares algorithm based on a specific set of sampling nodes. These are constructed out of a random draw in combination with a down-sampling procedure coming from the celebrated proof of Weaver’s conjecture, which was shown to be equivalent to the Kadison–Singer problem. Our result is non-constructive since we only show the existence of a linear sampling operator realizing the above bound. The general result can for instance be applied to the well-known situation of $$H^s_{\text {mix}}(\mathbb {T}^d)$$ H mix s ( T d ) in $$L_2(\mathbb {T}^d)$$ L 2 ( T d ) with $$s>1/2$$ s > 1 / 2 . We obtain the asymptotic bound $$\begin{aligned} g_n \le C_{s,d}n^{-s}\log (n)^{(d-1)s+1/2}, \end{aligned}$$ g n ≤ C s , d n - s log ( n ) ( d - 1 ) s + 1 / 2 , which improves on very recent results by shortening the gap between upper and lower bound to $$\sqrt{\log (n)}$$ log ( n ) . The result implies that for dimensions $$d>2$$ d > 2 any sparse grid sampling recovery method does not perform asymptotically optimal.