20VC x SaaStr: Nvidia Pays $6B for Poolside’s Model Factory, OpenAI Has to Go Public in 2027, and Why $9B No Longer Clears the Bar for Seed

Harry Stebbings, Rory O’Driscoll and I went through Nvidia’s ecosystem spending spree, OpenAI’s move from number one to number two, and what happens to CFO budgets when your best people are addicted to tokens.

#1. Nvidia paid $6B for Poolside’s Model Factory, and the trigger was a $2B round that didn’t close

Nvidia is paying $6B for a non-exclusive license to Poolside’s Model Factory, the internal system Poolside used to build its models, and separately investing $1B at a $12B pre-money valuation. 109 engineers got offers to join Nvidia’s open-weight Nemotron effort. The three founders are staying. The investor letter says explicitly that this is not an acquisition and not an acquihire.

Poolside had a six-week window to raise $2B to pay for a 40,000 GB300 cluster coming online in January. They didn’t close it in time, and they lost the cluster.

My read: it read almost depressing. Not being critical, but it showed that infinite capitalism is not as infinite as it looks. Even in the age of AI, and even with Nvidia seemingly funding everyone on planet Earth, the VC gravy train only runs so long. There’s only so much money coming out of big funds.

Rory’s read: it was an excellent letter, and one line does the work. They said they had found themselves on the right side of prediction in a market that scaled exponentially in capital intensity. Translated: we were right three years ago that there was a market for a US open-weight model, we built it, and the capital required for the next turn of the crank is beyond us.