Nvidia to invest up to $1 billion in Poolside, valuing the AI startup at $12 billion

Nvidia, the trillion-dollar chipmaker fueling today’s AI boom, is reportedly preparing one of its biggest startup bets yet. According to Bloomberg, the company plans to invest as much as $1 billion in Poolside, a Paris-based AI startup building software that helps developers write and refactor code.

The deal, still being finalized, would begin with a $500 million commitment and could double if Poolside meets its fundraising targets. The startup is in talks to raise $2 billion at a $12 billion pre-money valuation, quadrupling its valuation from just a year ago.

People familiar with the talks told Bloomberg that Poolside has already secured more than $1 billion in commitments, including roughly $700 million from existing investors. Nvidia and Poolside haven’t commented publicly.

“Nvidia Corp. plans to invest as much as $1 billion in the artificial intelligence company Poolside, according to people familiar with the matter — part of a deal that would quadruple the valuation of the AI startup,” Bloomberg reported.

Founded in 2023 by Jason Warner, the former CTO of GitHub, and Eiso Kant, Poolside builds AI assistants that help engineers generate code, debug projects, and automate repetitive development tasks. The company has grown quickly, positioning itself as one of the most ambitious startups in the “AI-for-software” space—a sector drawing massive investor attention as companies look for ways to speed up development cycles.

Poolside isn’t just focused on software. Earlier this month, it announced plans with CoreWeave to build a 2-gigawatt AI campus in West Texas, dubbed Project Horizon. The site will house more than 40,000 Nvidia GPUs when it comes online in December 2025—an enormous infrastructure play for a two-year-old startup.

Nvidia Bets Big on AI Startup Poolside With Up to $1 Billion Investment

For Nvidia, the investment is both strategic and symbolic. The company already dominates the AI hardware market, but betting heavily on Poolside suggests it’s widening its reach into the software layer that drives GPU demand. The move reflects a broader trend across the AI industry: hardware giants aligning with startups that promise to accelerate the next wave of model-driven tools.

If completed as reported, Poolside’s raise would mark one of the largest private rounds in 2025—and signal how investors are still pouring billions into companies with convincing stories about the future of AI-assisted coding.

Founded less than three years ago, Poolside now stands at the center of a growing arms race to automate programming itself. Whether the company can live up to a $12 billion valuation remains to be seen. But for Nvidia, a billion-dollar check may be a small price to pay for a deeper foothold in the software that could define the next decade of computing.