NVIDIA has signed a non-exclusive $6 billion licensing deal for Poolside AI's Model Factory platform, plus a $1 billion equity investment valuing the coding-AI startup at $12 billion pre-money. The deal quadruples Poolside's valuation from $3 billion just a year ago. Crucially, founders Jason Warner (former GitHub CTO) and Eiso Kant remain to run the company independently—this is not an acquisition or acquihire, though 109 Poolside employees have been offered positions at NVIDIA.
The structure is unusual: NVIDIA licenses Poolside's Laguna model family (trained on software development tasks) non-exclusively, meaning Poolside retains the right to sell to other customers. Existing investors receive a $76.20-per-share payout by end-2027 from the $6B licensing revenue, a return that rewards early backers who caught Poolside's Series B ($500M, Oct 2024, which NVIDIA also led). The company had failed to close a $2 billion raise for a 40,000 GB300 cluster it needed for frontier training, and later lost an allocation due to datacenter capacity constraints.
For practitioners, this signals NVIDIA's deep appetite for open-source model IP and talent: a pattern following similar structures at Groq and others. Poolside's founders are explicitly betting that the company will pivot toward infrastructure (the spun-out Poolside Infrastructure Company is building a 1.2 GW datacenter in Texas). The non-exclusive license means the Laguna family remains a potential product for competing platforms, but NVIDIA gets first access and founder focus. Watch whether Poolside's remaining team can rebuild a coherent company around compute provision rather than model training.