AI · October 14, 2026
Nvidia in early talks to acquire, acqui-hire, or invest more in Reflection AI
Nvidia is reportedly in preliminary negotiations to acquire Reflection AI, the developer of open models, or to increase its investment in the startup. Sources close to the matter told the Financial Times that a deal could be reached within the next few weeks, though the talks still carry a risk of failure.
The Financial Times noted that several structures could shape the outcome. Nvidia might buy Reflection directly or raise its equity stake, potentially paired with the provision of more chips and computing power. Another option is an acqui-hire, under which Nvidia would hire Reflection's staff and gain rights to its technology without taking control of the company. The outlet said this structure is more likely to help avoid lengthy regulatory review.
Nvidia has carried out both acqui-hires and direct acquisitions over the past year. In December, Groq, an inference chip startup, allowed Nvidia to use its technology in a deal reportedly worth 20 billion dollars. Groq's founder and chief executive, Jonathan Ross, moved to work with the chipmaker alongside other senior executives, while Groq continues to operate its own cloud business. Separately, Nvidia agreed on September 3 to pay 12.9 billion dollars to acquire Hugging Face, the model hosting platform.
Nvidia is already a major investor in Reflection. The chipmaker led the startup's 2 billion dollar funding round in October 2025, and the Financial Times reported that Nvidia has invested a total of 800 million dollars in the company. Reflection's chief executive, Misha Laskin, told CNBC in April that the latest round closed at a pre-money valuation of 25 billion dollars. Both Laskin and co-founder Ioannis Antonoglou were previously researchers at Google DeepMind before founding the company in 2024.
The report came five days after Reflection launched Beam, its first open model. Beam is a Mixture of Experts model with 501 billion parameters. The company prioritizes programming agents and is pitching Beam to compete with cheaper open models from China, such as DeepSeek and Kimi, in programming and agentic tasks.
Training for the Beam model was carried out on Nvidia GB300 systems that Reflection rented from Space Exploration Technologies under a June agreement worth up to 6.3 billion dollars. The monthly payment of 150 million dollars covers computing power from SpaceX's Colossus 2 data center in Memphis through 2029. In July, Nebius Group also agreed to sell an additional 1 billion dollars worth of AI computing capacity to Reflection.
Reflection is a venture-backed startup with other investors including Sequoia Capital Operations, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and DST Global. Neither Nvidia nor Reflection has publicly commented on the reported negotiations.