Eric Newcomer reports that Poolside AI has agreed a non-exclusive $6B licensing deal with Nvidia, alongside a $1B Nvidia investment at a $12B pre-money valuation.

Poolside AI has struck a $6 billion non-exclusive licensing deal with Nvidia, according to a letter to investors obtained by Newcomer. The AI model-building startup also raised $1 billion from Nvidia at a $12 billion pre-money valuation. The dual transaction represents one of the largest deals in the AI sector. Nvidia's licensing agreement gives it access to Poolside's technology, whilst the investment cements a strategic partnership between the two companies. Details about the specific technology being licensed or terms of the agreement were not disclosed. The deal underscores the growing value of AI model developers as large tech companies seek to expand their capabilities.

Poolside has released Laguna S 2.1, a 118-billion-parameter open-weight AI model designed for coding tasks. The model matches the performance of systems several times its size on benchmarks including Terminal-Bench 2.1 and SWE-Bench Pro, competing with models from DeepSeek, NVIDIA, and Thinking Machines. The model is compact enough to run on a single NVIDIA DGX Spark and is available on Hugging Face under an OpenMDW-1.1 license. Poolside trained it in under four weeks using 4,000 H200 GPUs. The release addresses growing demand for open-weight models that organisations can download and run on their own infrastructure for compliance and cost reasons. Co-CEO Jason Warner said Laguna S 2.1 provides "a model that enterprises and governments can put into production today, on their own hardware, at a cost that makes agentic coding practical at scale.