Nvidia to Pay $6B for Poolside AI Software, Hiring 109 Staff

Nvidia will pay $6 billion to license Poolside's AI model-development software, Model Factory, and plans to hire 109 of the company's employees who worked on its open-source model, Laguna, The Information reported Thursday, citing a Newcomer paywalled post.

The Newcomer story is based on a Poolside letter to investors, the report said. Nvidia will also invest $1 billion in Poolside at a $12 billion pre-money valuation. The three co-founders of Poolside will remain with the company. The letter described the deal as neither an acquisition nor an acquihire, which is a transaction centered on talent, according to the report.

Nvidia has become a major developer of open-source models, the report said. Poolside told investors that on its own, the company would have needed more access to Nvidia hardware than was possible if it wanted to keep competing in open-source model development, per the letter.

Neither Nvidia nor Poolside immediately replied to PYMNTS' request for comment.

The Poolside deal follows a pattern of Nvidia licensing technology and hiring talent from AI startups rather than buying them outright. In December 2025, Nvidia took a non-exclusive license to Groq's inference-chip technology and hired Groq's founder, president and other team members. Groq kept operating independently. "We haven't acquired Groq," an Nvidia spokesperson told PYMNTS at the time. "We've taken a non-exclusive license to Groq's IP and have hired engineering talent from Groq's team to join us in our mission to provide world-leading accelerate computing technology."

CNBC reported in September 2025 that Nvidia spent over $900 million to license technology from AI hardware startup Enfabrica and hired its CEO and other employees. Enfabrica's technology connects more than 100,000 GPUs and lets them act as a single computer, according to that report.

In June, Nvidia bought predictive AI software startup Kumo AI for $400 million. In December 2025, the company acquired SchedMD and said it would keep distributing that startup's open-source Slurm software, a workload management system for high-performance computing and AI.

For Nvidia, the Poolside deal secures model-development software and engineering talent without the costs of a full acquisition. The company's NVDA stock page shows an Alpha Score of 73, Moderate label, with shares at $215.32, down 0.71% on the session.