Nvidia in advanced talks to acquire AI21 Labs for up to $3 billion in talent-focused deal

Nvidia in advanced talks to buy Israel's AI21 Labs for up to $3 billion, report says

JERUSALEM, Dec 30 (Reuters) - Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab is in advanced talks to buy Israel-based AI startup AI21 Labs for as much as $3 billion, the Calcalist financial daily reported on Tuesday. Nvidia declined to comment, while AI21 was not immediately available to comment. A 2023 funding round valued AI21 at $1.4 billion. Nvidia and Alphabet's (GOOGL.O), opens new tab Google participated in that funding. AI21, founded in 2017 by Amnon Shashua and two others, is among a clutch of AI startups that have benefited from a boom in artificial intelligence, attracting strong interest from venture capital firms and other investors. Shashua is also the founder and CEO of Mobileye, a developer of self-driving car technologies. Calcalist said AI21 has long been up for sale and talks with Nvidia have advanced significantly in recent weeks. It noted that Nvidia's primary interest in AI21 appears to be its workforce of roughly 200 employees, most of whom hold advanced academic degrees and "possess rare expertise in artificial intelligence development." Calcalist said the deal to buy AI21 is estimated at between $2 billion and $3 billion. Nvidia, which has become the most valuable company in history at more than $4 trillion, is planning a large expansion in Israel with a new R&D campus of up to 10,000 employees in Kiryat Tivon, just south of the port city of Haifa - Israel's third-largest city. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has described Israel as the company's "second home." Nvidia has said that when completed, the campus will include up to 160,000 square meters (1.7 million square feet) of office space, parks and common areas across 90 dunams (22 acres), inspired by Nvidia's Santa Clara, California, headquarters. Nvidia expects construction to begin in 2027, with initial occupancy planned for 2031. Reporting by Steven Scheer; Editing by Lisa Shumaker Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Report: Nvidia could acquire LLM startup AI21 Labs for $3B - SiliconANGLE

Nvidia Corp. is reportedly in advanced talks to acquire AI21 Labs Ltd., a startup that develops large language models and agent development tools. Calcalist reported today that a deal could be worth between $2 billion and $3 billion. At the top end of the range, that's more than double the valuation AI21 received after its last publicly disclosed funding round in 2023. The investment included the participation of Nvidia, Google LLC, Samsung Electronics Co. and other prominent backers. According to Calcalist, AI21 quietly raised another $300 million from investors earlier this year. It's believed the round closed at a similar valuation as the 2023 raise. The report also revealed that AI21 is generating about $50 million in annualized revenue. Tel Aviv-based AI21 offers a series of open-source LLMs called Jamba. According to the company, its models can process long prompts up to 2.5 times faster than competing algorithms. The Jamba series owes its speed to an architecture that combines elements of a transformer model with a neural network design called Mamba. Mamba replaces transformers' attention mechanism, which they use to filter the data they process based on importance, with a so-called state space model. That's a mathematical structure originally invented to study physical objects. It enables a Mamba model to process long prompts using significantly less memory than a transformer, which boosts inference speeds. AI21 generates revenue with a paid software platform called Maestro. It includes tools that help developers build and manage artificial intelligence agents. Before companies make a dataset available to an AI agent for processing, they organize it in a form that lends itself better to analysis. Maestro promises to ease the process. It can harmonize documents stored in different file formats, remove unnecessary information that might confuse the AI agent and apply other optimizations. After an AI agent generates a prompt response, Maestro validates the accuracy of the output. Developers can have the platform display the processing results in a specific format such as a report. It's also possible to customize other details such as the amount of infrastructure the platform uses to generate a prompt response. Nvidia might be planning to integrate Maestro into Nvidia AI Enterprise, the AI software suite it ships with its graphics cards. The toolkit includes pre-packaged LLMs, development tools that enable researchers to build custom models and other resources.

Nvidia Eyes Another Talent-Focused Acquisition: Report - NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA)

NVIDIA Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) is reportedly in advanced discussions for another M&A deal aimed at acquiring talent, as it faces pressure from Google's internal chip development. NVDA stock is moving. See the chart and price action here. A Focus on Talent Nvidia is negotiating a deal to buy AI21 Labs in a transaction estimated to be worth between $2 billion and $3 billion, according to Ctech. Read Next: Top 10 Most Shorted Stocks: Lucid, MARA, Hims and More Insiders suggest the primary motivation for Nvidia is the startup's 200-person workforce, who hold advanced degrees and specialized expertise in machine learning. For several years, industry analysts considered AI21 as being "on the shelf," with other tech giants such as Google previously showing interest. Shifting Strategies AI21 recently changed its business focus, discontinuing Wordtune (its consumer writing tool) to prioritize enterprise solutions. The company's current flagship, Maestro, aims to boost model accuracy by 50%. Despite these technical strides, the firm's annual revenue is roughly $50 million, small compared to the billions earned by competitors like OpenAI. Expanding Nvidia's Footprint If finalized, the deal would become the fourth major buyout in Israel for the semiconductor giant. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has labeled Israel as a "second home" for the company. He recently announced a plan to build a massive campus in Kiryat Tivon, which could eventually house 10,000 workers by 2031. The potential acquisition follows Nvidia's massive $20 billion deal with Groq announced last week, which also had a massive transfer of high-level talent at the heart of the agreement. Jonathan Ross, Groq's founder and the original architect of Google's TPU program, will join Nvidia along with Groq's president and other key team members. Groq will continue to operate as an independent entity, and Nvidia gained access to Groq's specialized language processing unit (LPU) technology. Read Next: Metals Acting Like Meme Stocks -- Unconfirmed Rumor Of Major Silver Margin Call Photo: Shutterstock NVDANVIDIA Corp$187.18-0.19%Overview This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors. Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

Nvidia Looks to Acquire Israeli AI Startup AI21 Labs | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. The company is among the few startups in Israel working on a large-scale language model for artificial intelligence, Israeli tech publication Calcalist reported Tuesday (Dec. 30). The report says the deal could be valued at between $2 billion and $3 billion, up from AI21's last known valuation of $1.4 billion, reached during a fundraising round in 2023. PYMNTS has contacted Nvidia for comment but has not yet gotten a reply. According to the report, AI21 completed a $300 million fundraising round earlier this year led by Nvidia and Google, though it never officially confirmed the round. Estimates at the time indicated that the valuation had not climbed significantly since the 2023 funding, the report added. The report adds that AI21 had been considered a possible acquisition target for Google, though talks with Nvidia have recently advanced to reach the company's most senior levels. The company's main interest in AI21 appears to be its 200-person workforce, composed of staff with advanced academic degrees and rare expertise in AI development, the Calcalist report added. Calcalist notes that AI21 had been struggling to keep up with the advances of major artificial intelligence players. Earlier this year, the company paused development of Wordtune, its consumer-facing AI reading and writing assistant. A separate report from the publication says that Nvidia is planning a large expansion in Israel with a ⁠new R&D campus of up to 10,000 employees. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has described the country as the chipmaker's "second home." The possible acquisition comes as a number of Big Tech companies are closing out the year with similar deals designed to push AI deeper into products, infrastructures and monetization strategies, as PYMNTS wrote Tuesday. "Meta's acquisition of Manus adds millions of paying users and signals a sharper focus on subscription-based consumer AI, while Google, Amazon and Microsoft are rolling out new models and platforms across edge computing, smart homes and climate data," that report said. Also this week, Nvidia finalized the purchase of $5 billion worth of shares in Intel as part of a larger tech partnership. The announcement came days after the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that regulators had given their go-ahead for the planned investment, seen as a major endorsement of Intel from $4 trillion Nvidia.

Nvidia in talks to buy A21 Labs for $2B-$3B, Israeli media reports By Investing.com

Investing.com -- Nvidia is in advanced negotiations to acquire AI21 Labs for $2-3 billion, according to a Tuesday report from Israeli media outlet Calcalist. This would mark Nvidia's fourth acquisition in Israel and its second largest after Mellanox. The deal primarily targets AI21's workforce of approximately 200 employees, most with advanced academic degrees and rare experience in artificial intelligence development. The acquisition price represents about $10-15 million per employee. Unlock premium tools and insights by upgrading to InvestingPro - get 55% off today AI21 Labs is one of the few Israeli companies developing a large-scale language model for artificial intelligence. The company's last known valuation was $1.4 billion following a capital raise in 2023. Reports from last summer suggested AI21 completed a $300 million fundraising round led by Nvidia and Google, though these publications were never confirmed by the company. Founded in 2017 by Amnon Shashua and two others, AI21 has benefited from the boom in artificial intelligence, attracting significant interest from venture capital firms and investors. Shashua is also the founder and CEO of Mobileye.