[NVIDIA Acquires Poolside for $6 Billion: Buys Model Factory and Recruits 109 Employees] Beating AI Newsflash: NVIDIA will pay $6 billion to AI startup Poolside for a non-exclusive license to its model development system, Model Factory, while planning to extend offers to 109 employees involved in the development of the Laguna model. Poolside's founding team will remain, and the company will continue to operate independently, but NVIDIA will gain access to both the model development system and a group of core R&D personnel. Poolside's Model Factory is an infrastructure for developing AI models, covering data processing, training, reinforcement learning, and evaluation stages. Essentially, NVIDIA is acquiring a complete production system for training models. The $6 billion licensing fee will be distributed to Poolside's investors, and NVIDIA will also make an additional $1 billion investment. Poolside's pre-investment valuation stands at $12 billion. This deal is similar to NVIDIA's previous handling of Groq and Enfabrica: leveraging technology licensing, investment, and team recruitment to integrate critical AI technologies and talent into its ecosystem. [Original Link]