NVIDIA in Talks to Acquire AI21 Labs in Deal Valued up to $3 Bn: Report
Recently, NVIDIA also acquired AI inference chip startup Groq.
NVIDIA is reportedly in advanced discussions to acquire AI21 Labs Ltd., a Tel Aviv-based startup that builds large language models and AI agent development tools, in a deal valued between $2 billion and $3 billion, according to Israeli publication Calcalist.
This comes just a few weeks after NVIVIA acquired SchedMD, the company behind Slurm, the world’s most widely used open-source workload manager for high-performance computing (HPC) and AI. Recently, NVIDIA also acquired AI inference chip startup Groq.
The potential acquisition of AI21 would more than double AI21’s valuation from its last publicly disclosed funding round in 2023. That round included participation from NVIDIA, Google, Samsung Electronics and other major investors.
The report added that AI21 quietly raised an additional $300 million earlier this year at a similar valuation and is currently generating around $50 million in annualised revenue.
Founded in Israel, AI21 is best known for its open-source Jamba family of large language models. The models combine transformer architectures with a state space model design known as Mamba, allowing them to process long prompts using less memory and deliver inference speeds up to 2.5 times faster than traditional transformer-based systems.
AI21 monetises its technology through Maestro, a paid software platform that helps enterprises build, manage and validate AI agents. Maestro supports data preparation, output verification and infrastructure configuration for agent-based workflows.
