Nvidia agreed to pay $6 billion to license Poolside’s model-building technology and to invest $1 billion at a $12 billion pre-money valuation, a package reported to total $7 billion.
The deal is aimed at building an open-weight model inside Nvidia’s Nemotron effort to challenge rivals including OpenAI and Chinese developers such as DeepSeek and Kimi, and more than 100 employees from Poolside are expected to join Nvidia.
Poolside said in a shareholder letter the partnership seeks to "advance AGI as an open technology rather than one controlled by few," a line the company included while describing the transaction.
The move builds on Nvidia’s push into open-model work: the company formed the Nemotron Coalition in March to pool expertise, data and compute for downloadable models.
The timing coincides with a surge in low-cost Chinese open-weight models led by DeepSeek, which recent reporting said has driven record usage on U.S. developer platforms.
Poolside will remain independent, with founders staying outside Nvidia while continuing unspecified research work, and Nvidia and Poolside did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
