Nvidia spent over $900 million to hire Enfabrica CEO, license technology, CNBC reports

(Reuters) – Nvidia has spent over $900 million to hire Enfabrica CEO Rochan Sankar and other staff at the artificial intelligence hardware startup and to license the company’s technology, CNBC reported on Thursday.

The AI chip giant is paying in cash and stock, CNBC said, citing two people familiar with the arrangement. The deal closed last week and Sankar has already joined Nvidia.

Nvidia declined to comment, while Enfabrica did not immediately respond when contacted by Reuters.

The deal is reminiscent of Meta’s multibillion dollar stake in Scale AI, where the social media giant also poached its CEO Alexandr Wang to play a prominent role in its AI strategy, according to the CNBC report.

Enfabrica, a Silicon Valley-based chip startup working on solving bottlenecks in artificial intelligence data centers, released a chip-and-software system in July aimed at reining in the cost of memory chips in those centers.

It has raised $260 million in venture capital.

(Reporting by Juby Babu in Mexico City; Editing by Krishna Chandra Eluri)