Rumours that Nvidia is close to striking a deal for Israeli startup Run:ai are growing fast, with multiple analysts and industry insiders confirming to QA Financial the companies are in takeover talks.
A London-based tech analysts said Nvidia is likely to be prepared to pay “at least a few hundred million dollars, possibly up to $1 billion” for Run:ai.
Any such deal will be closely monitored by fintech firms, industry analysts, investors and the wider financial services space as any successful takeover would mean Nvidia will be able to significantly strengthen its dominant position in AI development and implementation.
A takeover of Run:ai would also help Nvidia to continue to control the AI-powered micro-chip space. the company is believed to control around 75% of the micro-chip market.
Run:ai
The Tel Aviv-based software developer, founded by Omri Geller, its current CEO, and Ronen Dar, currently the CTO, has become known as one of the world’s leading AI infrastructure orchestration and management platforms.
Not even five years old, Run:ai developed a virtualisation software layer in recent years, which can be tailored to the needs of different AI workloads running on GPUs and similar chipsets.
The product has attracted major interest from banktech, fintech and Insurtech firms as the orchestration platform is able to significantly speed up, simplify and enhance AI applications within the financial services space.
Two years ago, the firm was put in the spotlight as a range of major investors agreed to allocate $75 million. Led by Insight Partners and Tiger Global, investors included S Capital VS and TLV partners.
During the time of the capital injection, Geller said “we are the leading company in our sector, and it is important to us to establish ourselves as a big company that is building the AI operating system.”
Nvidia
Potential buyer Nvidia, generally considered as the world’s leading company in artificial intelligence capabilities, is experiencing a record year.
Although the potential acquisition of Run:ai would be the tech giant’s first serious takeover since it bought Mellanox for close to $7 billion in 2019, the firm’s value has exploded in the last 12 months.
In fact, it is now often named as the world’s third or fourth-most-valuable company as investors flocked en masse to the semiconductor as the power and capabilities of its micro-chips continue to swell.
For example, Nvidia chips largely power AI best-seller ChatGPT and the company is believed to control around 75% of the micro-chip market.
As one investment banker recently called Nvidia the ‘Taylor Swift for investors’, the company’s market cap currently hangs around $2.1 trillion.
Only yesterday, the company unveiled its latest more powerful artificial intelligence chips, thereby likely to further extend its dominance in the booming industry.
Chief executive officer Jensen Huang said on Monday that Nvidia’s Blackwell graphics processing units would “massively increase the computing power driving large language models.”
The Blackwell GPU has 208bn transistors, compared with 80bn in last year’s H100, in a measure of its increased power.
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