Nvidia reportedly agreed to pay $6B for a non-exclusive license to Poolside’s model-building system.

Nvidia is also offering jobs to 109 employees and investing $1B in Poolside at a $12B pre-money valuation, while Poolside’s founders stay.

The licensed Model Factory is Poolside’s internal platform for training, evaluation, reinforcement learning, architecture testing, synthetic data generation and data mixing across GPU clusters. Nvidia's $6B license targets this research process of Poolside, rather than a finished Laguna model.

An by licensing Model Factory, Nvidia is buying a faster research loop that may matter more than any one Laguna release.

Poolside says experiments that once took weeks to schedule can run in under an hour, giving Nvidia access to a much faster model-research loop.

The deal structure itself may become a repeatable way for Nvidia to absorb scarce AI capability without buying entire startups. It has reportedly used similar licensing-and-hiring arrangements with Groq and Enfabrica