Nvidia has spent more than $900 million to bring on Enfabrica CEO Rochan Sankar and other employees from the AI hardware startup, while also licensing the company's technology, according to CNBC. The deal, paid in cash and stock, closed last week, and Sankar has officially joined Nvidia.

Founded in 2019 by former Broadcom and Alphabet veterans, Silicon Valley–based Enfabrica has developed networking technology that can connect over 100,000 GPUs to function as a single computer. The approach could help Nvidia integrate its GPUs into large-scale systems, preventing costly processors from sitting idle due to data bottlenecks.

The move underscores Nvidia's strategy of securing top AI talent and critical technology through acqui-hire–style deals, a practice also pursued by Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. Unlike traditional acquisitions, these transactions avoid lengthy regulatory reviews while giving chipmakers and cloud giants direct access to engineers and IP.

Nvidia was already an investor in Enfabrica, having participated in a $125 million Series B round in 2023, followed by a $115 million funding round late last year led by Spark Capital with investors including Arm, Samsung, and Cisco. PitchBook valued the company at around $600 million post-money.

The deal also reflects Nvidia's push to expand beyond GPUs into full-stack AI infrastructure. Earlier this year, the company acquired Israeli startup Run:ai for $700 million and has invested nearly $700 million in U.K. data center startup Nscale. On Thursday, Nvidia announced a $5 billion stake in Intel to jointly develop AI processors.

While Nvidia's only major acquisition to date remains its $6.9 billion purchase of Mellanox in 2019, the Enfabrica deal marks one of its largest investments in talent and technology, reinforcing its dominance in the global AI chip race.