Nvidia is paying Poolside $6 billion for AI model-building software — and telling investors it isn't an acquisition

Nvidia will pay AI model-building startup Poolside $6 billion to license its Model Factory software — the system Poolside uses to build its open-weight Laguna coding models — in a deal structured, according to a letter to investors obtained by Newcomer, so that Nvidia does not become Poolside's owner. Nvidia is separately investing $1 billion in Poolside at a $12 billion pre-money valuation, and will offer jobs to 109 Poolside employees who worked on Laguna. All 3 of Poolside's co-founders are staying, and the company says it will keep operating independently.

The letter draws its own line: the deal "is not an acquisition and it is not an acquihire," Poolside told its investors — distinguishing it from the more familiar pattern this cycle, where a lab's technology and top researchers move to a bigger buyer while a shell of the original company is left behind. Here the license is non-exclusive: Poolside can reportedly sell the same Model Factory software to another buyer, and keeps the underlying IP.

Poolside's letter reportedly framed the deal as a hardware problem as much as a financial one: continuing to compete independently in from-scratch model training, it said, would have required more Nvidia GPU allocation than the startup could otherwise secure. That's a supply constraint increasingly deciding which AI labs stay fully independent and which restructure around whoever controls the chips.