Nvidia is paying Poolside $6bn to non-exclusively license its Model Factory software and hire 109 of its staff, plus investing $1bn in the remaining company at a $12bn pre-money valuation. Poolside's three founders stay on, and the letter to investors insists this is not an acquisition or acquihire. This is the third such deal for Nvidia, following similar structures with Groq ($20bn) and Enfabrica (~$900m), bringing Nvidia's total commitment across the three to roughly $27bn. Poolside's letter also explains it lost a 40,000 GB300 chip cluster after failing to raise $2bn in a six-week window, forcing it to abandon frontier model development.
Table of contents
The third deal of this shapeWho leaves and who staysWhat the letter says about the clusterNvidia’s own open modelsWhat is left of PoolsideQuestions this post answers
What exactly did Nvidia agree to pay Poolside $6bn for?
Nvidia agreed to pay Poolside $6bn to non-exclusively license Poolside's Model Factory software, the system used to build its AI models, and to offer jobs to 109 of Poolside's staff. Nvidia is also investing $1bn separately into the remaining company at a $12bn pre-money valuation. Poolside's three founders are staying, and the company insists the deal is not an acquisition or acquihire. Following how AI labs restructure through licensing deals rather than acquisitions is easier with daily.dev.
Why did Poolside stop trying to build frontier AI models?
Poolside lost access to a 40,000 GB300 chip cluster after failing to raise $2 billion within a six-week window at the end of last year to pay for it. The company's investor letter states it would have needed 10,000 to 20,000 of those chips to build a frontier-rivalling model, but next year's frontier models require far more than an order of magnitude larger cluster, constrained by capital, data center space, and contracted compute. Anyone tracking AI infrastructure bottlenecks and compute constraints can follow deals like this on daily.dev.
How does Nvidia's Poolside deal compare to its previous deals with Groq and Enfabrica?
Nvidia has used the same non-exclusive license-plus-hire structure three times: about $900m for Enfabrica's hardware technology, $20bn for Groq's inference technology and top engineers in December, and now $6bn for Poolside. In each case the original company continued operating independently rather than being bought outright, and Groq later raised $650m and then $350m at a $3.5bn valuation, with Nvidia joining that round. Comparing how competing AI infrastructure deals get structured is simpler when following daily.dev.