Nvidia Pays $6B for Poolside AI Software Licensing Deal

Nvidia plans to begin small-batch shipments of a China-specific AI chip variant by year-end, marking a new market entry strategy for the company. The chip is a language processing unit (LPU) developed with licensed Groq technology that pairs with Nvidia GPUs to improve AI chatbot response times. Chinese customers have already placed orders, signaling demand for the localized product.

Roboticists are celebrating incremental progress toward AI-powered robots that can perform multiple tasks without task-specific training, drawing parallels to the GPT-2 era of language models. At the Actuate robotics conference in San Francisco, Physical Intelligence demonstrated a robot arm making a latte using a single AI model trained on diverse tasks. The field remains early, with robots still struggling with basic manipulation, but venture funding and optimism about a breakthrough moment are high.

Marvell Technology has granted Google the right to acquire up to $12.2 billion in Marvell stock as part of an expanded semiconductor partnership. The deal, which boosted Marvell shares 9.9% on Wednesday, signals deepening collaboration between the two companies on chip development. The arrangement gives Google a financial stake in Marvell while securing access to semiconductor capabilities.

Nvidia is in discussions to invest in Mercor, a data labeling company, as part of a $20 billion funding round led by existing investor General Catalyst. Mercor has historically served closed-source AI model makers like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, but revenue from Nvidia is growing as the chip designer develops its Nemotron open-source models. The investment signals Nvidia's commitment to competing in open-source AI model development.