💼 Nvidia 'buys' Poolside for $6 billion
According to Newcomer, confirmed by Bloomberg, Nvidia will pay $6 billion for a non-exclusive license to Model Factory — the system on which Poolside built models, including the coding model Laguna — and offers to 109 employees. Plus $1 billion — into the rest of the company at a $12 billion pre-money valuation. The letter emphasizes: 'not a purchase and not an acquihire'.
🌍 The third deal in a few months for Nvidia using the 'license + hiring + equity' scheme after Groq (~$20 billion) and Enfabrica (~$900 million): technologies and engineers are leaving without a merger and antitrust review, which congressmen call a bypass of merger review.
👤 For small labs, the frontier race has become unbearable: Poolside did not have time to raise $2 billion for a cluster of 40,000 GB300s and is turning into a neocloud — the Poolside Infrastructure, spun off in January, is building a 1.2 GW data center in Texas.
Source 1: https://www.newcomer.co/p/sources-poolside-strikes-6-billion