Nvidia Plans Up to $1B Investment in AI Startup Poolside

Key Takeaways

Nvidia may invest up to $1 billion in Poolside.
Poolside targets coding automation for government and defense sectors.
AI startups, investors and enterprise buyers may benefit from Nvidia's expanding AI partnerships.

Nvidia Corp. plans to invest up to $1 billion in AI startup Poolside as part of a larger $2 billion funding round that would value the company at $12 billion. The investment would start at $500 million and could reach $1 billion if fundraising targets are met.

The deal is a significant increase from Poolside's previous $3 billion valuation established last year. According to sources, Poolside has already secured more than $1 billion in commitments for the round, including approximately $700 million from existing investors.

Magnetar, a money manager known for hedge fund investing, is also reportedly in discussions to participate in the funding round.

AI Infrastructure: The Trillion-Dollar Battleground
Key Initiatives Powering Poolside's AI Strategy
Poolside Background

AI Infrastructure: The Trillion-Dollar Battleground

"I'm delighted that AI startups build on Nvidia. They do so for several reasons. One, of course, our ecosystem is rich. Our tools work great."

- Jensen Huang

CEO, Nvidia

The race for AI infrastructure has become a trillion-dollar battleground where access to specialized processors is the true competitive advantage.

Graphics card maker turned AI powerhouse Nvidia has reached a $5 trillion market valuation as of October 2025. The company has positioned itself at the center of the AI ecosystem through strategic investments, including plans to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI, according to recent reports.

Nvidia's most recent investment is part of a broader trend of unprecedented spending on AI infrastructure. Companies are investing "tens of billions" in chips while seeing returns significantly lower than investments, creating what industry experts call an infrastructure-first approach to AI development.

Major players have formed strategic alliances — OpenAI with Microsoft, Anthropic with Amazon and Google — creating temporary competitive moats. Meanwhile, CoreWeave has emerged as a critical infrastructure partner for OpenAI with agreements totaling $22.4 billion.

As AI models grow more complex, specialized startups are developing better connections, storage solutions and methods to eliminate bottlenecks in AI processing. This has created what some describe as a "wild west" of innovation in backbone architecture, reminiscent of the early internet days.

Key Initiatives Powering Poolside's AI Strategy

Strategic Focus	Impact
Coding Automation	Targets government and defense applications
AGI Development	Aims to build artificial general intelligence with broad purposes
Infrastructure Expansion	Partnership with CoreWeave for 2-gigawatt data center in West Texas
Chip Procurement	Portion of new capital to purchase Nvidia GB300 chips
Ecosystem Integration	Joins 59 other AI startups receiving Nvidia investment in 2025

Poolside Background

Poolside was founded in April 2023 in San Francisco, California. Poolside is a frontier lab focused on building foundation models, AI agents and enterprise systems to deploy them. Its mission, according to the company, is for artificial general intelligence to "drive abundance for humanity."

Poolside's Product Portfolio

As part of the industry push toward AGI, Poolside focused its ambitions on reinforcement learning (RL). It builds AI models from scratch, customized to work within various enterprise infrastructures. These models are trained on internet-scale data combined with the company’s proprietary synthetic datasets. Poolside also specializes in: agents and multi-agent orchestration, developer surfaces, data and knowledge and foundation models.

Poolside's Market Position

Poolside's product offerings are geared toward organizations in highly regulated sectors, such as finance, defense and industrial. Customers are able to utilize Poolside via a strategic partnership with AWS. The company is backed by other well-known tech firms like Nvidia, Citi, eBay, Capital One, HSBC and LG.

Learning Opportunities

Webinar