US Department of Justice investigating Nvidia’s $700M acquisition of Run:ai
Nvidia announced the acquisition of the Israeli startup in April.
The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating chip giant Nvidia's buyout of Israeli AI startup Run:ai on antitrust grounds. Calcalist first revealed the stall in the deal last month. Nvidia announced the acquisition of the Israeli firm in April for around $700 million.
Run:ai's technology allows developers and teams to manage and optimize their artificial intelligence infrastructure.
"We'll continue to support aspiring innovators in every industry and market and are happy to provide any information regulators need," an Nvidia spokesperson said.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
U.S. antitrust enforcers have been closely examining big tech acquisition activity due to concerns that the concentration of new technologies in the hands of a few companies could stifle competition.
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Nvidia's profits and revenues have soared over the past year as its processors become the gold standard in the chip industry due to their ability to power AI applications, including training models like ChatGPT.
“Run:ai has been a close collaborator with NVIDIA since 2020 and we share a passion for helping our customers make the most of their infrastructure,” said Omri Geller, Run:ai co-founder and CEO, after the deal was announced. “We’re thrilled to join NVIDIA and look forward to continuing our journey together.”
The purchase of Run:ai is set to be Nvidia’s biggest acquisition in Israel since purchasing Mellanox for $6.9 billion in March 2019. Since the acquisition, Nvidia’s local R&D center in Israel, which was first established in 2016, grew by about 100%, reaching 4,000 employees in the country. Shortly after the Run:ai announcement, Nvidia also revealed it was purchasing Israeli AI company Deci in a deal estimated at around $300 million.
Run:ai raised $75 million in a Series C round in March 2022 led by Tiger Global Management and Insight Partners, who also led the previous Series B round. The round included the participation of additional existing investors, TLV Partners, and S Capital VC, bringing the total funding raised to date to $118 million.
Run:ai was founded in 2018 by Omri Geller (CEO) and Dr. Ronen Dar (CTO). Run:ai has developed an orchestration and virtualization software layer tailored to the unique needs of AI workloads running on GPUs and similar chipsets. Run:ai’s Kubernetes-based container platform for AI clouds efficiently pools and shares GPUs by automatically assigning the necessary amount of computing power – from fractions of GPUs, to multiple GPUs, to multiple nodes of GPUs.
