Nvidia has signed a nonexclusive technology licensing deal with U.S. AI startup Poolside. The contract is worth $6 billion. In addition, it will invest another $1 billion based on a $12 billion valuation. Rather than acquiring the company outright, it will secure only the technology and talent.
On the 23rd (local time), according to an internal shareholder letter from Poolside obtained by The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Nvidia struck the deal. Under the agreement, more than 100 Poolside engineers will move to Nvidia. They will be assigned to develop Nvidia's open-source AI model "Nemotron."
Poolside was founded in 2023. The founders are software developer Aiso Kant and former GitHub chief technology officer (CTO) Jason Warner. Its recently released open-source AI model "Laguna S" has gained popularity in the West.
At the end of last year, Poolside sought to secure 40,000 graphics processing unit (GPU) clusters. To do so, it tried to raise $2 billion but failed.
In early this month, Nvidia unveiled the lightweight open-source model "Nemotron 3.5 Lightning." It is also developing a massive open-source model with more than 1 trillion parameters. In March, it formed the "Nemotron Alliance" with Mistral, Thinking Machines Lab, and Perplexity.
U.S. AI corporations have focused on closed models that do not release source code. China, by contrast, has been rolling out open-source models such as DeepSeek and Moonshot's Kimi.