Taking acquihires to staggering sums, NVIDIA Corp. has reportedly spent more than $900 million to scoop up the leadership team of artificial intelligence (AI) chip startup Enfabrica and technology licensing rights.
The cash-and-stock deal, reported by CNBC on Thursday, which includes Enfabrica CEO Rochan Sankar and others, comes on the heels of NVIDIA’s $5 billion investment in Intel Corp. this week, and raises the bar in an escalating bidding war for AI talent among Big Tech.
NVIDIA was not immediately for comment on the report.
The 6-year-old Silicon Valley company, up the highway from NVIDIA, specializes in technology that unifies more than 100,000 GPUs into a massive computing system — precisely what NVIDIA covets as AI models grow more computationally demanding. NVIDIA showed early confidence by participating in the company’s $125 million Series B in 2023. Following another $115 million funding round later that year, PitchBook valued Enfabrica at approximately $600 million.
The Enfabrica acquisition reinforces NVIDIA’s strategy of building comprehensive AI infrastructure solutions beyond individual chip sales, positioning the company to offer complete systems that can scale to unprecedented computational demands. The acquisition also comes as NVIDIA continues to dominate the AI infrastructure market, with its GPUs serving as the foundation for training large language models (LLMs) and powering cloud-based AI services.
NVIDIA’s spending spree is arguably the most audacious among its peers hunting for AI talent. Tech giants Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Meta Platforms Inc., Microsoft Corp., and Amazon.com Inc. are following the same playbook with deals to acquire AI founders and their technologies. Nvidia’s move reveals bigger ambitions: it’s not satisfied being just a chip supplier but wants to dictate how those chips work together at massive scale.
Recent notable examples include Meta’s $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI, acquiring founder Alexandr Wang’s team and taking a 49% stake; Google’s $2.4 billion agreement to bring in Windsurf co-founder and CEO Varun Mohan along with licensing arrangements; and similar deals by Google for Character.AI founders, Microsoft for Inflection, and Amazon for Adept.
Unlike many tech giants, NVIDIA has historically been conservative with major acquisitions. The company’s largest previous deal was the $6.9 billion purchase of Israeli chip designer Mellanox in 2019, which provided crucial networking technology now integrated into NVIDIA’s Blackwell product line.
NVIDIA’s $40 billion bid to acquire chip design company Arm collapsed in 2022 because of regulatory opposition. More recently, the company completed a $700 million acquisition of Israeli AI infrastructure optimizer Run:ai.
