NVIDIA is preparing an unusually large deal with AI startup Poolside: The company will spend about $6 billion to license its technology and hire most of its employees, and will invest another $1 billion directly into the business.
According to the Wall Street Journal, NVIDIA hopes to leverage the expertise of the Poolside team to develop the Nemotron series of open models. The GPU giant hopes to significantly enhance its capabilities and create its own model ecosystem that can compete with solutions from American and Chinese artificial intelligence labs. This is especially true in the context of the rapid development of Chinese developers.
The strategy looks broader than typical technology purchases. NVIDIA is also reducing its reliance on one business: If demand for its accelerators drops sharply, the company will be able to use some of the freed-up GPUs for its own artificial intelligence development. So the makers of the shovels for the current AI gold rush are increasingly trying to play the role of one of the prospectors.
The basis for future work will be Nemotron models, including the recently launched Nemotron 3.5 Lightning. NVIDIA claims a fourfold increase in token generation speed, but a much smaller increase in the speed of executing agent tasks. Poolside can help businesses bridge this gap. In this way, NVIDIA not only gains technology and development teams, but also an insurance policy in case the AI market cools down.
It seems that even NVIDIA itself is beginning to doubt the stability of the AI market and is trying to prepare backup options for itself. Write in the comments how realistic this scene looks.