Nvidia has signed a $6 billion licensing agreement with U.S. AI startup Poolside, along with a $1 billion equity investment, to develop open-weight models on its Nemotron project as a counter to China's expanding open AI efforts. The Wall Street Journal reported the deal on the 22nd, with Nvidia paying $6 billion to license the technology and hiring roughly 100 engineers while remaining outside Nvidia, founders Eiso Kant and Jason Warner disclosed a failed $2 billion funding attempt for a GPU cluster in their shareholder letter dated the 20th. Poolside specializes in coding automation models for U.S. government and defense applications and will continue independent research, with its team helping improve Nvidia's largest Nemotron models. The partnership, framed as advancing AGI through open technology rather than closed monopolies, builds on Nvidia's March Nemotron Consortium with Mistral and Perplexity and CEO Jensen Huang's July statement on open ecosystems determining U.S. AI leadership. It also raises regulatory questions similar to Nvidia's prior $20 billion Groq licensing deal criticized by Congress. Nvidia reports earnings on the 26th, with shares closing at $214.72 on the 21st.