According to the Financial Times, Nvidia Corp. in initial discussions about the takeover of the open weight model developer Reflection AI Inc. or about investments in the startup.
People familiar with the matter told the newspaper that an agreement could be reached within weeks. The talks could still fail.
The FT described more than one way a deal could take shape. Nvidia could buy Reflection outright or increase its stake, perhaps along with a larger supply of chips and processing power. An acqui-hire is a third option. Under that agreement, 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 completed both an acquisition and an outright purchase last year. Inference chip startup Groq Inc. licensed its technology to Nvidia in a deal worth $20 billion in December. Founder and CEO Jonathan Ross joined the chipmaker along with other executives, and Groq continues to run its cloud business alone. Hugging Face Inc. was a clear buy. Nvidia agreed on September 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 had put a total of $800 million into the company. Chief Executive Misha Laskin told CNBC in April that Reflection’s latest funding round closed at a pre-money valuation of $25 billion. Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou (pictured above) were both researchers at Google DeepMind before founding the company in 2024.
The FT report comes five days after Reflection unveiled its first open-weight model, Beam. Beam is an expert mix model with 501 billion parameters. Coding agents were Reflection’s initial focus, and the company is pitching Beam against lower-cost open Chinese models like DeepSeek and Kimi for coding and agent work.
Beam’s training ran on Nvidia GB300 systems that Reflection bought from Space Exploration Technologies Corp. in a June deal worth up to $6.3 billion. rents. Payments of $150 million per month will cover capacity at SpaceX’s Colossus 2 data center in Memphis through 2029. Nebius Group NV agreed in July to sell Reflection another $1 billion in AI capacity.
Reflection is a venture capital-backed startup whose investors also include Sequoia Capital Operations, Lightspeed Venture Partners LP and DST Global LP. Neither Nvidia nor Reflection have commented publicly on the discussions.
Photo: Speed of Light
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