Nvidia is in talks to deepen its investment in Reflection AI or acquire the open-weight model developer outright, the Financial Times reported on Saturday, citing people with direct knowledge of the matter. The talks are at an early stage and an agreement could come in the coming weeks, though the discussions could still fall apart, according to Reuters‘ account of the FT report.
A deal could take several forms. The FT said one option is an acqui-hire, in which Nvidia would hire Reflection’s staff and license its technology instead of buying the company, a structure that could avoid a lengthy regulatory review. Bloomberg, citing a person familiar with the matter, reported that Nvidia could instead offer the startup more computing power or raise its equity stake, and that no terms have been reached. Reflection declined to comment, and Nvidia did not immediately respond, Bloomberg said.
Nvidia is already a major backer, having invested $800 million in Reflection, the FT reported. The startup was founded in 2024 by former Google DeepMind researchers Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou, and it has held talks to raise $2.5 billion at a $25 billion valuation, according to an earlier Wall Street Journal report cited by Bloomberg. Reflection has also struck billion-dollar computing deals with SpaceX and cloud provider Nebius.
The talks come a week after Reflection launched Beam, its first open-weight model, on October 5. The company says Beam is built for coding and agent tasks at a lower cost than many rivals and scores comparably to GLM-5.2, a flagship open model from China’s Z.AI, on advanced reasoning benchmarks. Open-weight developers release a model’s parameters so others can use and modify it freely, a market where Chinese models such as DeepSeek and Kimi have a strong presence.
A Reflection deal would extend a run of Nvidia transactions that included a $13 billion agreement to buy Hugging Face in September and a roughly $20 billion licensing pact with chip startup Groq, Bloomberg noted. Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang is a vocal supporter of open-weight models, and Washington wants American alternatives to cheaper Chinese ones. President Trump’s July 2025 AI action plan says the US needs “leading open models founded on American values.”
Sources
- Financial Times: Nvidia in talks to acquire US ‘open’ model start-up Reflection AI (October 10, 2026; paywalled, headline and opening only read)
- Reuters via finwire: Nvidia in talks to invest further in Reflection AI or buy it, FT reports (October 10, 2026)
- Bloomberg via The Business Times: Nvidia weighs deeper ties with open-model developer Reflection AI through investment or computing deal (October 11, 2026)