Nvidia Corp. is in early talks to acquire open-weight model developer Reflection AI Inc. or invest more in the startup, according to the Financial Times.
People familiar with the matter told the paper that an agreement could come within weeks. The talks could still collapse.
The FT described more than one way a deal could take shape. Nvidia could buy Reflection outright or increase its stake, possibly alongside a bigger supply of chips and computing power. An acquihire is a third option. Under that arrangement Nvidia would hire Reflection’s staff and license its technology without taking control of the company, and the FT said the structure would likely avoid a lengthy regulatory review.
Nvidia has done both an acquihire and an outright purchase in the past year. Inference chip startup Groq Inc. licensed its technology to Nvidia in December in a deal reported at $20 billion. Founder and Chief Executive Jonathan Ross moved to the chipmaker with other senior executives, and Groq has kept running its cloud business on its own. Hugging Face Inc. was a straight purchase. Nvidia agreed Sept. 3 to pay $12.9 billion for the model hosting platform.
Reflection already counts Nvidia as a major investor. The chipmaker led the startup’s $2 billion round in October 2025, and the FT said Nvidia has put $800 million into the company in total. Chief Executive Misha Laskin told CNBC in April that Reflection’s latest round had closed at a $25 billion pre-money valuation. Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou (pictured above) were both researchers at Google DeepMind before they founded the company in 2024.
The FT report comes five days after Reflection unveiled its first open-weight model, Beam. Beam is a mixture-of-experts model with 501 billion parameters. Coding agents were Reflection’s first focus, and the company is pitching Beam against lower-cost Chinese open models such as DeepSeek and Kimi on coding and agentic work.
Beam’s training ran on Nvidia GB300 systems that Reflection rents from Space Exploration Technologies Corp. under a June agreement worth up to $6.3 billion. Payments of $150 million a month cover capacity at SpaceX’s Colossus 2 data center in Memphis through 2029. Nebius Group N.V. agreed in July to sell Reflection another $1 billion in AI capacity.
Reflection is a venture capital-backed startup that also counts Sequoia Capital Operations, Lightspeed Venture Partners LP and DST Global LP among its investors. Neither Nvidia nor Reflection has commented publicly on the talks.
Photo: Lightspeed