Nvidia has reportedly paid out more than $900 million to hire the CEO of AI networking hardware company, Enfabrica. Rochan Sankar and a number of his colleagues at Enfabrica will become Nvidia staff members as part of the deal, and Nvidia will get the option to license the company's hardware, according to CNBC.
The deal will reportedly involve cash and stock options, and comes just two years after Nvidia invested part of a $125 million fund into Enfabrica. However, while the company was valued in the high hundreds of millions, paying close to a billion dollars for a handful of staff and a license would potentially value the company much higher. Clearly, Enfabrica has talent and technology that Nvidia feels is crucial to its ongoing development. An Nvidia spokesperson declined to comment on the report.
Indeed, it's not hard to see why. Nvidia's meteoric rise in value and prominence in recent years has been on the back of its AI hardware developments. Today, its GPUs power many of the world's data centers (and "AI factories") with 72 within each of the latest Blackwell GPU stacks. In some of these data centers, though, 10s or even hundreds of thousands of GPUs can be working in conjunction to power the latest AI technologies, and it's the connections between those chips that Enfabrica may be able to help improve.
Nvidia has touted its NVLink technology for allowing high-speed communication between its GPUs, allowing them to work on the same task in parallel without bottlenecking one another or causing synchronization issues. Enfabrica's tech may go beyond that, though, with the company claiming it can help connect more than 100,000 GPUs. That's the kind of scalability that Nvidia is looking for as it continues its global expansion.
This major (and expensive) hire for Nvidia mirrors those announced by other tech firms in recent months. Meta famously spent tens of billions hiring the CEO of ScaleAI and other AI experts from various companies, and many of the top tech firms like OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, and Google have been trying to poach each other's top talent for many months now. More recently, however, Meta announced a freeze to its hiring and spending spree, and Google fired several hundred of its AI contractors.
Nvidia isn't slowing down, though. Alongside this new hire, it recently announced its purchase of a $5 billion stake in CPU giant, Intel, and that it was investing over $700 million into the development of a new data center in the UK in partnership with startup Nscale.
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