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.
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