Investing over 900 million US dollars! NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA.US) "buys people" and "buys technology", poaching the core team of AI chip startup Enfabrica.

According to reports, NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA.US) has spent over $900 million to poach the CEO Rochan Sankar and other employees of AI hardware startup Enfabrica, while also acquiring the company's technology license. In this transaction, NVIDIA Corporation will pay the amount in cash and stock, and the deal was completed last week. Sources cited in the report stated that Enfabrica CEO Sankar has officially joined NVIDIA Corporation. Founded in 2019, Enfabrica's core technology enables the interconnection of over 100,000 graphics processing units (GPUs). The technology can help NVIDIA Corporation build integrated systems around their own chips, allowing multiple GPU clusters to collaborate efficiently, operating like a single standalone computer. In fact, NVIDIA Corporation has had previous financial dealings with Enfabrica: in 2023, NVIDIA Corporation participated in the Enfabrica Series B funding round led by Atreides Management, with a total of $125 million invested. The valuation of Enfabrica at that time was not disclosed, but it was reported to have increased by 5 times since the Series A funding. At the end of last year, Enfabrica completed another $115 million funding round, with investors including Spark Capital, Arm, Samsung, and Cisco Systems, Inc. According to market data platform PitchBook, after this funding round, Enfabrica's valuation was around $6 billion. This kind of transaction pattern of "poaching key talent + acquiring technology license" is not uncommon in the technology industry - giants such as Meta, Alphabet Inc. Class C, etc., have previously conducted similar operations. For example, in June this year, Meta announced a $14.3 billion investment in AI company Scale, acquiring 49% of its shares, valuing the company at over $29 billion; at the same time, Scale CEO Alexandr Wang joined Meta to lead the "super intelligence" team focusing on general artificial intelligence (AGI). In July, Alphabet Inc. Class C reached a similar deal worth $2.4 billion, bringing in Windsurf co-founder and CEO Varun Mohan and several development personnel, including technology licensing fees. In addition, last year, Alphabet Inc. Class C also absorbed the founding team of AI chat Siasun Robot & Automation company Character.AI in a similar manner; Microsoft Corporation and Amazon.com, Inc. also completed deals involving "talent + technology" with AI companies Inflection and Adept respectively. It is worth noting that just this Thursday, NVIDIA Corporation and Intel Corporation announced a major partnership to jointly develop personal computer (PC) and data center chips; at the same time, NVIDIA Corporation stated that it will invest $5 billion in Intel Corporation.