Nvidia has paid more than $900 million to bring in Enfabrica CEO Rochan Sankar, several of the startup’s employees, and to license its technology, according to people familiar with the matter. The deal, which closed last week, involves a mix of cash and stock.
Sankar, who co-founded Enfabrica in 2019, has now joined Nvidia. The move resembles recent acquihire-style agreements by other tech giants such as Meta and Google, which have pursued top artificial intelligence engineers through direct talent and technology deals rather than full acquisitions.
Enfabrica develops networking systems that can connect over 100,000 graphics processors, making large clusters of chips operate more like a single computer. This capability is critical for companies like Nvidia, whose GPUs power the training of large language models and cloud-based AI services.
While Nvidia declined to comment and Enfabrica did not provide a statement, the deal underscores how crucial hardware infrastructure has become since the AI boom accelerated after OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022. Nvidia’s chips now serve as the foundation of major projects, including Microsoft’s new $4 billion data center in Wisconsin.
Nvidia first invested in Enfabrica in 2023 during a $125 million Series B round led by Atreides Management. The company later raised another $115 million from investors including Spark Capital, Arm, Samsung and Cisco, reaching a valuation of about $600 million, according to PitchBook.
The latest move adds Nvidia to a growing list of companies scooping up AI expertise. In June, Meta spent $14.3 billion to secure Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang and his team. Google followed with a $2.4 billion deal for Windsurf co-founder Varun Mohan and other researchers, while Amazon and Microsoft have made similar plays for Adept and Inflection.
Unlike its rivals, Nvidia has rarely relied on major acquisitions. Its largest purchase remains the $6.9 billion deal for Mellanox in 2019, which supplied networking technology that still underpins Nvidia’s latest Blackwell products. A planned acquisition of Arm collapsed in 2022 due to regulatory pressure. More recently, Nvidia completed a $700 million purchase of Run:ai, an Israeli company specializing in AI infrastructure optimization.
This week alone, Nvidia has announced some of its biggest bets to date. In addition to the Enfabrica deal, the chipmaker revealed a $5 billion investment in Intel to co-develop processors and confirmed a nearly $700 million stake in U.K. data center startup Nscale.
The $900 million agreement highlights Nvidia’s determination to secure not only hardware but also the talent and technology that will shape the next generation of artificial intelligence systems.
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