Nvidia in Advanced Talks To Buy AI21 Labs in $2–3 Billion Talent-Driven AI Deal
By The Media Line Staff
Nvidia is in advanced negotiations to acquire Israeli artificial intelligence company AI21 Labs in a transaction estimated at between $2 billion and $3 billion, Calcalist reports. The talks, which have recently intensified, would give the US chipmaker rapid access to one of Israel’s most concentrated pools of AI research talent.
Neither Nvidia nor AI21 Labs commented on the report.
If completed, the deal would center primarily on human capital rather than products, people close to the discussions said. AI21 employs roughly 200 staff, most with advanced academic training in artificial intelligence, positioning the potential acquisition as an effective large-scale acquihire at an implied cost of roughly $10 million to $15 million per employee.
AI21 was founded in 2017 by Professor Amnon Shashua, Professor Yoav Shoham, and Ori Goshen, and was originally viewed as Israel’s most ambitious attempt to develop a large-scale language model capable of competing with global leaders such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Shoham and Goshen serve as co-CEOs, while Shashua is chairman. Nvidia and Google first invested in the company during a 2023 funding round that valued AI21 at $1.4 billion.
Earlier this year, AI21 completed a $300 million fundraising round led by Nvidia and Google, though the company did not formally confirm the round or disclose its valuation. Estimates at the time suggested little change from its prior valuation.
In recent years, AI21 has narrowed its focus as competition in generative AI accelerated. The company halted development of Wordtune, its long-running consumer-facing writing assistant, and shifted toward enterprise AI products, where accuracy and reliability are critical. Its flagship enterprise platform, Maestro, is designed to significantly improve language-model precision, and the company has also introduced a new reasoning model aimed at faster performance with lower memory usage. Despite these efforts, industry estimates put AI21’s annual revenue at about $50 million.
For Nvidia, an AI21 acquisition would mark its fourth major purchase in Israel and its second-largest after the $7 billion Mellanox deal. The company also acquired Deci and Run:ai in 2023 for a combined $1 billion. Nvidia has been expanding aggressively in Israel, recently announcing plans for a massive campus in Kiryat Tivon that could eventually house up to 10,000 employees by 2031.
A sale of AI21 would represent a more modest outcome for Shashua compared with Mobileye’s $15 billion acquisition by Intel, though he is already leading a separate AI venture focused on advanced reasoning models.
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