[AINews] Poolside gets $12B reverse-execuhire to NVIDIA; founders stay for $1B, employees go for $6B, Infraco scaling to 7GW neocloud
NVIDIA struck a $12B deal with AI coding startup Poolside, licensing its Model Factory and hiring 109 of its technical employees.
NVIDIA spent roughly $12B in an unusual reverse-execuhire of Poolside, licensing the company's Model Factory while hiring 109 of its ~115 technical staff; founders retain a $1B stake and employees receive about $6B. Poolside had raced to raise $2B to fund a 40,000 GB300 cluster after missing a six-week funding window, and founders argue frontier-scale training now requires an order of magnitude more compute plus contracted data center space. An infrastructure arm spun out in January 2026 is scaling toward 7GW as a neocloud. The newsletter also recaps OpenAI and Anthropic agent-platform releases.
- NVIDIA licenses Poolside's Model Factory; 109 technical employees join NVIDIA for $6B, founders keep $1B.
- Poolside missed a six-week window to raise $2B for a 40,000 GB300 cluster arriving in January.
- Founders say next-generation frontier models need an order of magnitude more compute and data center space.
- Recap: OpenAI shipped Codex desktop, memory, and collaborative editing features; GPT-Image-2 transparent backgrounds in preview.
- Anthropic GA'd computer use, browser tool, Skills API, and Files API with 500 RPM limits and 1 TB per org.
- Organizations
- Poolside
From the original article
13 min read at latent.space
Less than a month ago we had just featured Poolside’s Model Factory with Eiso Kant on the pod (following our Paper Club coverage): It appears that Jensen really, really liked Poolside too, as he went from investor to doing licensing their factory and hiring 109 of their employees: Unless things changed drastically, this accounts for the overwhelming majority of the technical Poolside employees :
latent.space
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