Days after its recent licensing deal with AI chip firm Groq, Nvidia is reportedly acquiring Israel AI firm AI21 Labs for a deal in the $2 to $3 billion range.

According to Calcalist, the chip giant is in advanced talks to acquire the Tel Aviv-based startup, with Nvidia keen to acquire AI21's 200-odd employee base.

The business produces the proprietary Jurassic models, and the open weight Jamba family, which is available across the hyperscalers as well as major AI platforms such as Hugging Face.

The purported deal comes after Nvidia all but acquired AI chipmakers Groq, in a deal which saw it license Groq's tech for a likely $20 billion, as well as absorb Groq's CEO, president, and other talent.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang claimed the Groq deal would extend Nvidia's AI factory architecture "to serve an even broader range of AI inference and real-time workloads.”

Coupled with Groq, AI21 would in effect round out Nvidia's inference stack on both hardware and software fronts, as Huang and company would inherit tools such as Maestro, an AI planning and orchestration system that provides automated inference scaling.

Based on a hybrid of the text-to-token transformer neural network and the speed-based, memory-light Mamba deep learning architecture, AI21's models come optimized for long-context inference, which entails vast amounts of data helping to power agents for business use. In contrast, Nvidia's current NeMo models are primarily transformer-centric and provided as toolkits as opposed to enterprise-specific task solutions.

AI21 also advocates neuro-symbolic AI, an approach that combines the pattern recognition of neural networks with the logical reasoning and rule-based, top-down structure of symbolic AI, in which human experts explicitly program the facts and logic an AI system should use.

AI21 Labs to date

Founded in 2017, AI21 was touting agentic AI before many competitors, using instead the term "thought partners" to describe AI agents in business workflows.

A $155 million Series C fundraising round in 2023 saw its valuation rise to $1.4 billion. A further round of $300 million last year saw backing by Google and Nvidia, but according to reports the deal was neither completed, officially disclosed, nor incorporated into AI21's capital structure.

The firm's Nvidia partnership has seen its models available via the Nvidia API catalog. AI21 last year joined Nvidia Inception, a global accelerator program designed for startups using AI, data science, and high-performance computing (HPC).

SDxCentral has contacted Nvidia for comment.