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The semiconductor giant, Nvidia is reportedly close to acquiring Lepton AI. Lepton AI is a startup company that leases servers that run on Nvidia’s AI semiconductor chips. The deal is said to be worth several hundred million dollars. The company was started only two years ago and has received $11 million in funding from CRV and Fusion Fund in a seed funding round.
Server rental is becoming a thriving market for tech startups with a major player like Together AI which has raised over $500 million in venture funding. Together AI is only one year older than Lepton AI.
Nvidia Corporation is a global industry leader in the creation, advancement, and promotion of programmable graphics processors and software. The firm will be competing with big cloud providers like Amazon and Google and Together AI in the cloud and enterprise software industry.
Nvidia Acquires Gretel
Gretel is a San Diego-based firm that offers a platform to generate data for training artificial intelligence. The company was acquired by Nvidia last week but the purchase’s terms remain undisclosed. Wired reported that the price tag was nine figures. This reported figure is more than Gretel’s most recent estimated value of $320 million.
Gretel was founded in 2019 by Ali Golshan, the company’s CEO, along with Alex Watson, Laszlo Bock and John Myers. Its staff of about 80 people will be merged into Nvidia to help integrate its technology into its range of generative AI services for developers.
Gretel fine-tunes other AI models, tailoring them for specific industries, then adds proprietary technology and monetizes the product. Investors have funded Gretel with almost $67 million in venture money. Gretel joined Microsoft’s Pegasus Program for Startups and announced a partnership with Microsoft Azure in December 2023.
Nvidia’s Spree of Innovations
Nvidia launched the Omniverse Replicator platform in 2022. It is one of the synthetic data technologies it has integrated into its product range. Synthetic data is data generated with computer simulation and is used to train AI models. It comprises texts, videos, and photos that can be used in conjunction with real-world data to more effectively and economically train AI models.
Nvidia recently released the Nemotron-4 340B mini-models, which are intended to generate synthetic data for various industries. It also launched a number of technologies to further the development of humanoid robots, including the NVIDIA Isaac GR00T N1. This is the first foundation model for generic humanoid reasoning and skills that is completely open and configurable.
Nvidia also unveiled a host of new products on Wednesday at the GTC event. Some of the products include Blackwell Ultra, Rubin, and an optics technology that allows data centers to install additional GPUs using very minimal space.
Nvidia has continuously increased its AI computing capability by almost four times with each innovation, from Hopper in 2022 to Blackwell in 2024 and the anticipated Rubin in 2026.
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