Nvidia in talks to acquire US ‘open’ model start-up Reflection AI

Nvidia is in talks to acquire or deepen its investment in US start-up Reflection AI, a developer of open-weight models that President Donald Trump’s administration hopes will rival cheap Chinese alternatives, people with direct knowledge of the matter said.

Talks are at an early stage and a deal could take a number of shapes, including a so-called ‘acqui-hire’ where Nvidia would hire staff and license technology without the drawn-out regulatory review that comes with a full acquisition, the people added.

Nvidia, already one of Reflection’s largest shareholders, may also choose to deepen its ties with the start-up via a further equity investment or a deal to provide it with more chips and computing power.

A deal between the two companies could be reached in the coming weeks according to multiple people with knowledge of the matter, although they cautioned discussions could fall apart. Deal terms under discussion could not be established but Reflection was last valued at $25bn in a March funding round.

Reflection and Nvidia declined to comment.

Acqui-hires have become increasingly popular among Big Tech companies looking to avoid antitrust scrutiny of AI dealmaking. Nvidia used a similar format with chip designer Groq in a $20bn deal in December. That deal attracted a lawsuit from jilted Groq employees this week.

Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company, has been on an investment spree over the past two years in a bid to bolster the AI economy and shore up its position at the heart of it. The company already has an open-weight family of AI models known as Nemotron, but lacks a frontier-scale model of its own.

In recent months it has increasingly focused on fostering a market for open-weight models, which users can customise and run on their own hardware. They can be far cheaper for businesses to operate than the most advanced versions of OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude.

In July, Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, led the industry in calling for a domestic open-weight “ecosystem” he said was essential for “creating opportunities for innovation and prosperity across the country”. In September, the $5.5tn company agreed to acquire Hugging Face, a repository for millions of models and data sets, for $13bn.

Nvidia has poured tens of billions of dollars into large AI labs including OpenAI, neocloud businesses such as Nebius and a string of smaller groups. That in turn has created additional demand for its chips, which remain the crucial commodity for companies building or running AI models.

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Reflection is considered a strategically significant asset for the US in its AI race with Chinese rivals such as DeepSeek. This week it unveiled its first public, customisable AI product, which runs on Nvidia chips. Reflection claims the model is on a par with Z.ai’s GLM-5.2, a leading Chinese competitor.

The group’s founders Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou previously worked on Google’s AI model Gemini.

Nvidia has already invested $800mn into Reflection, which is also backed by venture firms including Sequoia Capital, Disruptive and 1789 Capital, at which Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr is a partner.

Reflection has partnered with the Pentagon and the Department of Energy, and struck agreements to develop AI models for US allies such as South Korea.

Additional reporting by Stephen Morris