Inside Nvidia’s $100B Dealmaking Spree, Elon Musk’s Massive Chip Ambitions

Akash Pasricha (0:13)

Welcome, everyone, to The Information's TITV. My name is Akash Pasricha. It is Wednesday, October 7th. Today on the show, Nvidia is on a stunning streak of major M&A deals. We'll talk to our reporters behind our new in-depth feature to find out where the chip giant's deal making could take it next. We'll then turn our attention to Tesla and SpaceX AI's Terafab, and what the latest is on their Texas chip factory. We'll also take a look at what it means for Intel.

We're also going to look at Atlassian's push into new AI tools as it tries to stave off industry disruption. And to close out the show, we're going to talk with our partners at PwC about the massive AI infrastructure build out and how long it can sustain itself. It's going to be a great show, so let's get right on into it.

Between Hugging Face, Grok, and Poolside, Nvidia is on a stunning streak of major M&A and licensing deals. And it all raises the question of where the company's deal making will take it next. We pulled together several reporters from our newsroom to report out that question in a new in-depth feature published on our website. I want to bring on Valida Pau and Phoebe Liu to talk more about their reporting. Welcome to you both. It is great to have you here.

I want to start with you, Valida. I mean, so we know the deals that Nvidia has done. You and Phoebe and our team found some new reporting on deals that Nvidia might be looking to do. What do we know about that?

Valida Pau (1:47)

Well, Nvidia sure did a lot of deals in the summer that kept his team and us very busy. One of the most notable examples probably is that they were interested in buying OpenRouter as well, which we know ultimately went to Stripe.

Nvidia executives had caught wind of a looming takeover that before Stripe is going to enter exclusivity talks with OpenRouter, and they asked if they can slow it down and have more time to take a look at it and make a generous offer. But that was pretty notable. But that did not pan out, and ultimately the Cawson brothers took on OpenRouter and they moved on to buy Huckingface, which served a similar purpose that it's a middle ground for all these open source models.

Akash Pasricha (2:42)

What about, Valida, the deals that they could be looking to do? I mean, you had some good reporting on this.

Valida Pau (2:50)

We tried to understand what's driving Jensen Huang, the founder CEO, on what is his grand visions, and we felt like to make sure there's thousands of open source models running on Nvidia chips, he may likely to take a look at robot makers, or self-driving car technologies, local AI about running local AI models on local devices. It's not going through the clouds, and these are all things that he have said publicly that's Nvidia's growth area. So people who work with Nvidia, like bankers, lawyers, and investors, all see that Nvidia could continue to push there, and then do more investments or even acquisitions to boost your efforts and to just expand its offerings across everything that could run on its chips.

Akash Pasricha (3:39)

So Phoebe, I want to get into some of the specific relationships here that Nvidia has with some of these companies and specific deals they could be looking at. So let's start with Figure. This was a name that came up in the story. What do we know about Nvidia's relationship with them and what ultimately they might be looking to do with that relationship?

Phoebe Liu (3:58)

Yeah. So Figure is a humanoid robotics company. I think it makes human-looking robots that are five, six or something like that. And the reason-

Akash Pasricha (4:07)

Is that an important detail here, five, six?

Phoebe Liu (4:10)

No, it's just funny to me.

And I think the reason Jensen Huang and Nvidia are so interested in robotics is that training a robot takes so much data and so much compute, kind of even more so than kind of the large language models and the text-based models that have already driven Nvidia to the world's biggest company by MarketCap. And Figure is a company that kind of epitomizes a lot of that compute-heavy training that Nvidia would want to seed. Nvidia is not just invested in Figure. It's invested in lots of robotics companies and wants to increase that going forward. But in our reporting, we found that Nvidia is planning to invest another $1 billion into Figure sometime next year.

Akash Pasricha (4:59)

And how do we understand why robotics, Phoebe, is such a focus for Nvidia? Because every other investment, it seems, that we've talked about together, me and you, on this show, it's been how do we prop up the AI ecosystem and get people to buy more GPUs, essentially. I mean, that's been Jensen's playbook. Robotics, I mean, is it the same?