NVIDIA acquires ‘Model Factory’ from Poolside for $6B

Nvidia has purchased Poolside’s Model Factory (infrastructure for developing and training AI models) and 109 employees for $6 billion. Simultaneously, they’ve put another $1 billion into Poolside itself at a pre-money valuation of $12 billion. All three founders will remain at the company, and the investors will be paid out $6 billion by the end of 2027. This is “neither an acquisition nor an acqui-hire.”

Poolside was working on their code generation model called Laguna and the infrastructure for training models. What they had built was the model factory, which was the focus of this transaction. With this purchase, Nvidia gets all the tools needed to build their own models (in addition to the ones they’re currently developing as part of the Nemotron suite of open source models). They now have control over every step of the AI production process. After buying Groq for $20B and Enfabrica for $900M, Nvidia is slowly but surely consolidating the different parts of the AI ecosystem and becoming the designer of the AI age instead of just a chipmaker.