Nvidia Weighs Buying Open-Weight Start-Up Reflection AI

Nvidia may be trying to move up the stack, from selling the picks and shovels of AI to owning more of the gold mine. The company is in talks to acquire Reflection AI or raise its stake in the start-up, according to the Financial Times, as relayed by Reuters. The discussions are early, a deal could happen within weeks, and they could still collapse.

The FT says three paths are being discussed: a full buyout, an acqui-hire, or a bigger investment. That middle option would let Nvidia hire Reflection’s staff and license the technology without buying the company outright. It would also likely be easier to clear than a classic merger review. Nvidia has done something similar before, when it brought in the team behind Groq and licensed its technology in a deal CNBC valued at about $20 billion.

Nvidia is already deeply involved with Reflection. The FT says it has committed $800 million, and the start-up has raised close to $2.6 billion overall from backers including Nvidia, Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed. In April, chief executive Misha Laskin told CNBC that Reflection was raising fresh money at a $25 billion pre-money valuation.

Reflection itself is young, having been founded in 2024 by Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou, both former Google DeepMind researchers. Its first open-weight model, Beam, is aimed at coding and AI agents and is meant to take on lower-cost Chinese models like DeepSeek and Kimi. A deal would also give Nvidia a bigger model business, alongside its own open Nemotron models. But the antitrust angle is the one to watch. Nvidia already dominates AI chips, and it keeps investing in the companies that need them.

And the cash side is not the problem. Over the last four quarters, Nvidia produced about $127 billion in free cash flow. The real question is whether regulators decide that owning more of the AI stack looks too much like one company trying to hold both the faucet and the plumbing.