❯ Nvidia in talks to acquire or invest more in open-weight model maker Reflection AI, moving the chipmaker further into models

Full purchase or just the teamNvidia is in early talks with US AI startup Reflection AI, the Financial Times reported on October 10, citing people familiar with the matter. Options include a full acquisition, hiring the team and licensing its technology, or adding investment and compute. According to TIKR’s account, a deal could come within weeks or fall apart; Reflection declined to comment.

Models you can download and run yourselfReflection builds open-weight models, which companies can download, modify to their needs and run on their own hardware. On October 5 it released its first open-weight model, Beam, aimed at coding and agentic tasks. Nvidia has its own family of open models called Nemotron, and buying Reflection would expand its position in the model layer.

$800 million already investedNvidia has already invested $800 million in Reflection. In April, Reflection CEO Misha Laskin told CNBC the company was raising at a $25 billion pre-money valuation, the most recent publicly known price. No acquisition price for the current talks has been reported.

What "hiring only" avoidsHiring staff and licensing technology can skip the lengthy regulatory review a full acquisition usually faces, according to PYMNTS. Nvidia used a similar approach with chip company Groq last December, licensing its technology and hiring its CEO in a deal CNBC valued at about $20 billion. Which option is chosen determines whether Reflection’s other shareholders receive acquisition proceeds or are left with a company whose core team is gone.

▮ SIGNALThe better open models get, the more companies want to buy chips and run them in-house, which gives a chip seller reason to nurture models itself.