Nvidia paid over $900 million to hire Enfabrica CEO Rochan Sankar

Nvidia just spent over $900 million to bring in Rochan Sankar, the CEO of AI hardware firm Enfabrica, along with a group of his engineers, and to grab the rights to the company’s core technology; all in one sweep.

The deal, first reported by CNBC, was paid for using a mix of cash and stock, and closed last week. Rochan is now officially on Nvidia’s payroll.

Nvidia now owns access to Enfabrica’s hardware tech, the kind that can hook up 100,000 GPUs to work together like one brain.

The details line up with what we’ve seen across Big Tech this year, so this is Nvidia copying the same recruiting blueprint that Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have used to scoop up AI talent without triggering regulatory headaches.

Enfabrica was founded in 2019, with its selling point being infrastructure; building the data plumbing that lets GPU clusters run like one unified machine, which is exactly what Nvidia wants. The company’s newest systems don’t just run one chip at a time. They run 72 GPUs in tall racks, all working together. That’s the setup going into the $4 billion data center in Wisconsin that Microsoft just announced.

This is all part of Nvidia’s bigger play to sell complete AI systems, and the company is actually already invested in Enfabrica during a $125 million Series B round in 2023, led by Atreides Management. The startup didn’t give a dollar value for its valuation, but said it was five times bigger than it had been during its previous round, per CNBC’s report.

Rochan’s move to Nvidia follows a string of similar acqui-hire deals in the AI space. In June, Meta paid $14.3 billion to get Alexandr Wang, the founder of Scale AI, and took a 49% stake in the company.

One month later, Varun Mohan, the co-founder of coding startup Windsurf, joined Google in a $2.4 billion deal, which also included licensing terms. Google also acquired the team behind Character.AI last year. Microsoft grabbed Inflection, and Amazon got Adept.

Nvidia also closed a $700 million purchase of Run:ai, an Israeli company whose technology helps software makers optimize their infrastructure for AI.

Nvidia moves money without buying entire companies

Even though Nvidia’s chips are everywhere in the AI world, it hasn’t been on a shopping spree. The company’s only billion-dollar acquisition was back in 2019, when it paid $6.9 billion for Israeli chip designer Mellanox. The networking tech from Mellanox still powers Nvidia’s latest Blackwell lineup.

Nvidia did try to buy Arm for $40 billion, but regulators blocked it in 2022.

In the last year, it bought Run:ai, a Tel Aviv-based startup, for $700 million. The company helps developers manage and optimize GPU usage for AI applications.

Just this week, Nvidia said it had taken a $5 billion stake in Intel, and confirmed that both companies will now build AI processors together. It also revealed a fresh $700 million investment in Nscale, a British startup focused on data center tech.

Two years ago, Nvidia was pushing toward a $1 trillion valuation. Now, it’s worth over $4.28 trillion, a quadruple jump since 2023.

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