Nvidia is circling the open-source coding world — and it already owns a seat at the table.
The Financial Times reported Saturday that Nvidia is in talks to deepen its investment in Reflection AI, the open-source AI startup it already backed with $800 million, or to acquire the company outright. The talks are early-stage, and the report — citing people with direct knowledge — notes a deal could take several forms. One possibility: a so-called acqui-hire, in which Nvidia would hire Reflection's staff and license its technology rather than buy the company whole, a structure that could avoid a lengthy regulatory review. An agreement could come in the coming weeks, or the discussions could fall apart entirely.
Reflection, founded in 2024 by former DeepMind researchers Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou, builds tools that automate software development — one of the fastest-growing use cases for AI. Chief executive Laskin told CNBC in April that the startup was raising fresh capital at a $25 billion pre-money valuation. On Monday, the company launched its first open-weight model, Beam, positioning itself to compete in coding and agentic tasks against lower-cost Chinese models such as DeepSeek and Kimi.
The courtship makes strategic sense for Nvidia. The company's dominance in AI training chips is well established, but the industry's center of gravity is shifting toward inference and AI agents — the software layer that actually uses all that compute. Open-source coding models sit at the intersection of both: they drive demand for GPUs while winning over the developer community that decides where to run them. Snapping up a team with DeepMind pedigree and a fresh open-weight coding model would strengthen Nvidia's grip on that developer layer at a moment when open-source alternatives are gaining real momentum.
It is also a familiar playbook. Rather than risk a bruising regulatory fight over a full acquisition of a well-funded AI startup, Big Tech has increasingly favored acqui-hires and licensing deals — a pattern regulators have watched with growing skepticism. The FT report's mention of that structure is telling: both sides appear to be thinking about how a deal looks in Washington and Brussels, not just in the boardroom.
For the open-source AI community, the talks are a double-edged signal. Nvidia's deepening interest validates the open-weight approach — Beam's launch this week already put Reflection on the map. But a full absorption by the world's most valuable chipmaker could change the character of that openness over time. The next few weeks will tell.
The story is developing. As reported, Reflection declined to comment on the FT report, and Nvidia did not immediately respond to requests for comment. What is certain: the battle over who controls AI-powered software development is accelerating, and Nvidia intends to be in it — one way or another.