Nvidia spends $900M to hire Enfabrica CEO and license startup’s tech

Nvidia (NVDA.O) has spent more than $900 million to bring on Enfabrica CEO Rochan Sankar, along with other employees from the AI hardware startup, while also licensing the company’s technology, CNBC reported Thursday.

The deal, paid in cash and stock, closed last week, and Sankar has already joined Nvidia, according to people familiar with the arrangement.

Enfabrica, based in Silicon Valley, is addressing a major bottleneck in artificial intelligence: how to connect tens of thousands of chips into a network that can operate as a single, unified computer. Without efficient networking, even high-performance chips like Nvidia’s can sit idle while waiting for data. The startup’s technology reportedly enables up to 100,000 AI chips to be linked before network slowdowns occur.

Nvidia declined to comment on the report, and Enfabrica did not immediately respond to inquiries. Founded by former Broadcom (AVGO.O) and Alphabet (GOOGL.O) veterans, Enfabrica has raised $260 million in venture capital and in July launched a chip-and-software system designed to reduce memory costs in data centers.

The move mirrors recent strategies by Big Tech rivals. In June, Meta (META.O) acquired a 49% stake in Scale AI and brought CEO Alexandr Wang into its AI leadership, while Google hired key staff from Windsurf, an AI code generation startup courted by OpenAI.