NVIDIA, the US-based giant chipmaker, is making a major push into AI models with a $6 billion deal with AI startup Poolside, as it seeks to compete with leading US and Chinese AI models.

Under the agreement, NVIDIA will pay $6 billion to license Poolside’s technology and bring most of its engineers into the company. NVIDIA will also invest $1 billion in Poolside at a $12 billion pre-money valuation, according to The Wall Street Journal (WSJ). The deal was first reported by Newcomer.

More than 100 Poolside employees, including engineers, are expected to join NVIDIA and contribute to Nemotron, the company’s open-weight AI model project. They are expected to work on NVIDIA’s largest and most advanced Nemotron models.

The deal could increase NVIDIA’s competition with Chinese AI developers such as DeepSeek and Kimi K3, while also bringing it into closer competition with US frontier AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

Through this NVIDIA-Poolside $6 Billion deal, NVIDIA is advancing its open-weight AI efforts. In March, it launched the Nemotron Coalition, bringing together model developers and AI labs including Mistral AI, Perplexity, Reflection AI and Thinking Machines Lab to advance frontier-level foundation models through shared expertise, data and computing resources.

For Poolside, the agreement follows funding and computing challenges. According to the shareholder letter reviewed by the WSJ, a failed fundraising effort in 2025 caused a reckoning for the startup and indirectly led to the NVIDIA deal.

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