Overview
- Nvidia reportedly agreed Monday, August 24, 2026, to pay about $6 billion for a license to Poolside’s Model Factory and has offered jobs to more than 100 Poolside engineers to join its Nemotron team.
- The license is reported to be non-exclusive, Poolside’s founders remain independent, and Nvidia is also said to be making a separate $1 billion investment that values Poolside at roughly $12 billion pre-money.
- Poolside’s weakened bargaining position followed a failed $2 billion funding round that left it without the GB300 compute cluster it needed to train frontier models, which shaped the deal’s structure.
- Nvidia is folding Poolside’s tooling into Nemotron, its open-weight model family, and Nemotron 4 is reported to be in training with a possible fall release according to coverage.
- The transaction deepens Nvidia’s role across chips, data-center finance and model tooling, puts it in closer competition with major labs that are also its customers, and shifts engineers and practical know‑how from an independent startup toward Nvidia’s stack.