Nvidia has struck a major deal with AI startup Poolside, combining a $1 billion investment with a separate $6 billion payment for non-exclusive rights to use the company’s “model factory” technology, according to the source article. The report also said Nvidia hopes to bring more than 100 Poolside engineers into its orbit, a move widely seen as part of a broader attempt to strengthen its open-model strategy. The transaction comes as Nvidia continues to build out the Nemotron family and related open AI efforts. The article said Nvidia has released Nemotron 3 models since late 2025, with the Ultra version briefly becoming the strongest open-weight model in the United States in June. It also described a wider ecosystem push, including the Nemotron Alliance and model work spanning robotics, physical-world simulation, autonomous driving, and biomedicine. Poolside, founded in 2023 by Eiso Kant and former GitHub CTO Jason Warner, had been under pressure after a planned 2-gigawatt data center project in Texas unraveled and an associated $2 billion financing fell through. Nvidia’s interest appears centered on Poolside’s internal “model factory” system, which Kant said can take a model from training to release in five to eight weeks while running 10,000 to 20,000 experiments per month with a team of fewer than 70 researchers.

NVIDIA has open-sourced Alpamayo 2 Super, a new inference model for autonomous driving and embodied AI, as the company sharpens its push into physical AI and robotics. The model has 34 billion parameters in total, combining a 32 billion-parameter NVIDIA Cosmos 3 Super Reasoner visual-language reasoning core with a 2 billion-parameter Diffusion Action Expert. According to the company, Alpamayo 2 Super adds Chain-of-Causation reasoning, allowing it to simulate edge cases in a virtual physical world within milliseconds and derive optimal decisions. It scored 79.2 on the LingoQA autonomous driving benchmark. CEO Jensen Huang said physical AI and robotics represent the next major wave of artificial intelligence, adding that self-driving vehicles are essentially robots with four wheels. The report also mapped out Taiwan’s role in NVIDIA’s ecosystem expansion, naming TSMC for foundry work on chips including Thor and Jetson, Foxconn and Quanta for system integration and mass assembly, and several industrial PC makers for edge control hardware. Other companies cited include Solomon in 3D AI vision sensing, HIWIN and related firms in precision motion components, Mirle in pneumatic control, and Delta Electronics in lightweight power modules. The article added that the 2026 Taiwan Automation Intelligence and Robot Show, scheduled for Aug. 19, could add to market attention on the sector.

U.S. stocks rallied sharply Monday as strong corporate earnings and signs of easing tension around the Strait of Hormuz lifted risk appetite across markets. The Dow Jones Industrial Average jumped 1.71% to close above 54,000 for the first time, while the S&P 500 rose 1.79% and the Nasdaq Composite gained 2.59%, both setting fresh records. Oil prices extended losses after Axios reported that the U.S., Iran and Oman were nearing a temporary agreement aimed at reopening the Strait of Hormuz, restoring a ceasefire and creating room for follow-up nuclear talks. WTI crude fell 5.58%, and Brent dropped below $80. The move in energy also fed into rates. The 10-year U.S. Treasury yield slipped about 6 basis points to around 4.6%, and CME FedWatch showed the probability of a 25-basis-point rate hike in September falling to 57.1% from 67.2% a day earlier. Investors are now looking to Friday’s nonfarm payrolls report for the next major macro signal. AI remained the strongest equity theme, but this time the rally spread well beyond chipmakers. Semiconductor, memory, optical communications, AI software, and data center infrastructure names all advanced. Palantir, ARM, Intel, Sandisk, Micron, AMD, Nvidia, and Bitdeer were among the names in focus, while markets also turned to upcoming earnings, SpaceX lockup expirations, and storage-sector results later this week.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a post on X that the company has launched Alpamayo 2 Super, which he described as a frontier open reasoning model built for autonomous driving. Huang said the next phase of AI development will extend from software intelligence into robotics, with self-driving vehicles serving as a key entry point into the robotics era. He said Alpamayo 2 Super can do more than “see” road conditions: it is designed to understand and reason through complex scenarios and think before taking action. According to Huang, the model can act as a core AI system for robotaxis, driverless trucks, shuttles, delivery vehicles, agricultural robots, and future large-scale mobile robotic systems. Nvidia is releasing the model for commercial use under the OpenMDW-1.1 license, allowing developers and enterprises to research, fine-tune, and deploy it. Huang added that open models can help improve the safety and reliability of autonomous driving systems.

At CES 2026, Jensen Huang declared the screen era of generative AI over, introducing the Rubin GPU platform (3.6 ExaFLOPS inference) and open-source Alpamayo models that bring reasoning to autonomous driving and scientific research.