Nvidia reportedly pays $6B to license Poolside's Model Factory, plus $1B at $12B valuation
rohanpaul_ai · x · 2026-08-23
Nvidia reportedly agreed to pay $6B for a non-exclusive license to Poolside's internal Model Factory — a platform covering training, evaluation, RL, architecture testing, synthetic data generation and data mixing across GPU clusters — rather than a finished Laguna model.
The deal also includes job offers to 109 employees and a $1B investment at a $12B pre-money valuation, with founders staying. Poolside says experiments that once took weeks to schedule now run in under an hour, giving Nvidia a much faster model-research loop.
The license-and-hire structure may become a repeatable way for Nvidia to absorb scarce AI capability without full acquisitions — it has reportedly done similar deals with Groq and Enfabrica.
Related event: Nvidia's Reported $7B Poolside Deal Targets Top Open-Weight Model(14 posts)→
More from Venture
- AI-armed devs report 3x consulting MRR and juggling 11 client gigs at once — teodorio · 2026-10-15
- Dev vibe-codes open-source newsletter platform, 83% cheaper than Beehiiv from $19/mo — marclou · 2026-10-15
- Why data companies are printing money: labs pay millions for env-shaped nails — sarahookr · 2026-10-15
- marclou shows off DataFast's live visitor globe: 699 concurrent on one site — marclou · 2026-10-15
- A $15k AI SEO client-finding system built on Claude, free to download — aryanXmahajan · 2026-10-15
- One product photo plus one Seedance 2.5 prompt yields a full 15-second commercial — CurieuxExplorer · 2026-10-15