Nvidia just spent over $900M on Enfabrica CEO, technology licenses (www.cnbc.com)

Nvidia quietly paid more than $900 million in cash and stock to bring Enfabrica CEO Rochan Sankar and other employees onboard and to license the startup’s networking technology, according to people familiar with the deal. The transaction closed last week and follows Nvidia’s earlier $125 million investment in Enfabrica in 2023. The move resembles recent “acquihire”-style deals by other cloud players and signals Nvidia doubling down on talent and intellectual property to accelerate its systems strategy rather than just selling chips. Technically, Enfabrica’s key pitch is a fabric that can connect more than 100,000 GPUs so large clusters behave like a single computer—capabilities that directly address scaling pain points for training giant models. That complements Nvidia’s shift from standalone GPUs to rack-scale systems (e.g., 72-GPU racks) and follows its prior networking boost from the Mellanox acquisition. By folding in Enfabrica’s tech and team, Nvidia can more tightly integrate interconnects, software and chips to improve performance, efficiency and turnkey offerings for hyperscalers and enterprises building massive AI training clusters.