Nvidia is reportedly in negotiations to take a position in xAI. xAI is looking for to lift $5 billion (about 6.09 trillion won) at a price of $45 billion (about 62 trillion won), and the day before, news broke that it was also negotiating with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) UGX fund.
The Recent York Post, citing well-informed sources, reported on the first (local time) that Nvidia is negotiating with CEO Elon Musk to take a position in artificial intelligence (AI) startup xAI.
The Information previously reported that CEO Musk was negotiating strategic investments with technology firms along with investment firms corresponding to Valor Equity Partners, Sequoia Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz, but didn’t reveal specific names.
It’s unusual for NVIDIA, which sells semiconductors to technology firms, to take a position in its customers. Regarding this, one expert explained, “Even when NVIDIA invests in xAI, xAI’s competitors will still purchase NVIDIA’s chips,” adding, “Otherwise, this transaction won’t ever proceed.”
In reality, NVIDIA invested in greater than 20 firms last yr, and the common characteristics of the investment targets are firms that use NVIDIA GPUs or software, including Mistral AI, Cohere, Hugging Face, and Coreweave.
Particularly, all AI startups are hoping for investment from NVIDIA. That is on account of the expectation that a stable business shall be possible with not only funding but additionally GPU support.
Even inside NVIDIA, it is claimed that a partnership based on investment is natural as CEO Musk has cooperated extensively with NVIDIA across the whole business.
CEO Jensen Huang praised CEO Musk for constructing the world’s largest supercomputer in 19 days in a podcast last month. CEO Musk also said of Nvidia’s latest Blackwell AI chip, “For AI, there’s currently nothing higher than Nvidia hardware.” They’ve known one another well for over ten years.
Nevertheless, if the investment is definitely made, NVIDIA shall be ignoring OpenAI’s investment request.
Within the technique of recently raising $6.6 billion, OpenAI asked investors, including NVIDIA and UGX, not to take a position in five firms which might be considered competitors, including xAI, Antropic, SSI, Perplexity, and Glynn.
Although the investment has not been finalized, xAI has already confirmed contact with two firms, UGX and NVIDIA. The remainder of Open AI investors are also listening to their movements.
Reporter Park Chan cpark@aitimes.com
