Nvidia's $7B Poolside play: license the model factory, not the lab
Nvidia is handing Poolside $6B for a license to Model Factory, its open-weights-building pipeline, plus $1B in equity at a $12B valuation, and pulling 100+ staff onto Nemotron while the founders stay put. It's the third run of the same playbook after Groq and Enfabrica: absorb the mechanism of AI production under a licensing deal that sidesteps antitrust review. The catch — Poolside's Laguna models still trail DeepSeek and Claude on coding benchmarks, so Nvidia is buying leverage, not the frontier.