Nvidia drops a cool $900 million on Enfabrica tech and hiring its CEO, report claims — AI networking chip company boasts capacity to connect 100,000 GPUs together

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang looking smug during a Thematic Event on Advanced Manufacturing in China.

(Image credit: Getty Images/VCG)

Nvidia has reportedly paid out more than $900 million to hire the CEO of AI networking hardware company, Enfabrica. Rochan Sankar and a number of his colleagues at Enfabrica will become Nvidia staff members as part of the deal, and Nvidia will get the option to license the company's hardware, according to CNBC.

The deal will reportedly involve cash and stock options, and comes just two years after Nvidia invested part of a $125 million fund into Enfabrica. However, while the company was valued in the high hundreds of millions, paying close to a billion dollars for a handful of staff and a license would potentially value the company much higher. Clearly, Enfabrica has talent and technology that Nvidia feels is crucial to its ongoing development. An Nvidia spokesperson declined to comment on the report.

Indeed, it's not hard to see why. Nvidia's meteoric rise in value and prominence in recent years has been on the back of its AI hardware developments. Today, its GPUs power many of the world's data centers (and "AI factories") with 72 within each of the latest Blackwell GPU stacks. In some of these data centers, though, 10s or even hundreds of thousands of GPUs can be working in conjunction to power the latest AI technologies, and it's the connections between those chips that Enfabrica may be able to help improve.

Nvidia has touted its NVLink technology for allowing high-speed communication between its GPUs, allowing them to work on the same task in parallel without bottlenecking one another or causing synchronization issues. Enfabrica's tech may go beyond that, though, with the company claiming it can help connect more than 100,000 GPUs. That's the kind of scalability that Nvidia is looking for as it continues its global expansion.

This major (and expensive) hire for Nvidia mirrors those announced by other tech firms in recent months. Meta famously spent tens of billions hiring the CEO of ScaleAI and other AI experts from various companies, and many of the top tech firms like OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, and Google have been trying to poach each other's top talent for many months now. More recently, however, Meta announced a freeze to its hiring and spending spree, and Google fired several hundred of its AI contractors.

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Jon Martindale is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. For the past 20 years, he's been writing about PC components, emerging technologies, and the latest software advances. His deep and broad journalistic experience gives him unique insights into the most exciting technology trends of today and tomorrow.

4 Comments Comment from the forums

JTWrenn

This type of thing shouldn't be allowed. It should have the same oversite as any merger because that is what it is. I hate that companies do stuff like this and get away with it.

We are destroying just about every market ecosphere out there but killing off competition via conglomeration. It is bad for just about everyone but the rich.
Reply
A Stoner

JTWrenn said:
This type of thing shouldn't be allowed. It should have the same oversite as any merger because that is what it is. I hate that companies do stuff like this and get away with it.

We are destroying just about every market ecosphere out there but killing off competition via conglomeration. It is bad for just about everyone but the rich.
The rich are by far and away the least of the reasons money flows upward like this. >98% of people follow trends and throw their money at the 0.1%. Brand name clothes, just a few actors and actresses in TV and Movies, the same retread loser politicians year after year, almost always from the same back ground. Apple, nVidia, Intel, McDonalds, Starbucks, Taylor Swift... New names are hard to sell, new faces hard to sell. Even the most destroyed names end up getting the money out of the pockets of the low end losers, Kardashians, Bud Light, Target.

I agree, these sorts of events are destructive to having a properly running competitive business world, but they are inevitable due to consumer choices. Without the nVidia brand, even if this company produced something of marginal value that could eventually be amazing with more investment, the chances of it actually selling enough of the marginally good enough equipment to remain afloat or even expand and improve its products is nearly non existent. Which is why most of these companies sell out, as it is really their only path getting paid.
Reply
tusker79

A Stoner said:
The rich are by far and away the least of the reasons money flows upward like this. >98% of people follow trends and throw their money at the 0.1%. Brand name clothes, just a few actors and actresses in TV and Movies, the same retread loser politicians year after year, almost always from the same back ground. Apple, nVidia, Intel, McDonalds, Starbucks, Taylor Swift... New names are hard to sell, new faces hard to sell. Even the most destroyed names end up getting the money out of the pockets of the low end losers, Kardashians, Bud Light, Target.

I agree, these sorts of events are destructive to having a properly running competitive business world, but they are inevitable due to consumer choices. Without the nVidia brand, even if this company produced something of marginal value that could eventually be amazing with more investment, the chances of it actually selling enough of the marginally good enough equipment to remain afloat or even expand and improve its products is nearly non existent. Which is why most of these companies sell out, as it is really their only path getting paid.
Should we just do nothing and accept this herd behavior? Aren't there things communities can do? Some towns don't let franchises open restaurants etc in their town. Your attitude seems very defeatist.
Reply
JTWrenn

A Stoner said:
I agree, these sorts of events are destructive to having a properly running competitive business world, but they are inevitable due to consumer choices.
They are in no way caused by consumer choices with their and are not inevitable. You could easily create a more competitive business market with proper regulation.

You could argue that they are inevitable because we still have money in politics so the regulations never get enforced or always get rolled back. Instead the truth is we get an ebb and flow. We are all the way back to where we were 100 years ago with the robber barons. It has to get very bad for people to start turning it around because they are often idiots.
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