💼 Nvidia allocates $7 billion to open models and chases DeepSeek and Kimi
Nvidia is purchasing a non-exclusive license to the Model Factory model development system from Poolside for $6 billion and investing an additional $1 billion at a $12 billion valuation. 109 Poolside engineers will join the Nemotron team, while the founders will remain at independent Poolside. Nvidia emphasizes: this is "not an acquisition or an acquihire."
🌍 Nvidia is paying billions for the technology of building models for the first time, rather than for compute, through a "license plus hiring" scheme that is not formally an acquisition. According to WSJ, the goal is to make Nemotron competitive with DeepSeek, Kimi, and the closed models of OpenAI and Anthropic.
👤 If the plan works, Nemotron will be supplemented with open weights that can be downloaded, fine-tuned, and deployed locally without subscriptions to closed APIs.
Source 1: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/nvidia-is-spending-6-billion-to-build-a-powerful-u-s-alternative-to-chinese-ai-c51c38cc