Nvidia Corp NVDA has acquired a Canadian AI startup CentML, for undisclosed financial terms. The news was reported by Logic on Friday, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter.
CentML specializes in optimizing AI, offering innovative solutions that significantly enhance efficiency and performance.
The U.S. chip giant tapped CentML CEO Gennady Pekhimenko as a senior director for AI software at Nvidia.
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CentML Background
According to the company’s post on X (formerly Twitter), CentML will cease operations, and its AI-optimization services will no longer be available as of July 17
Pekhimenko, a computer science associate professor at the University of Toronto, co-founded CentML in March 2022 with his doctoral students Wang and Anand Jayarajan.
CentML CTO Sam Wang and COO Akbar Nurlybayev also joined Nvidia. According to the report, in June, Nvidia also tapped at least 15 other engineers and two interns from CentML.
The startup had raised $30.9 million in total venture capital from backers. Nvidia had participated in the startup’s $27-million seed round in October 2023.
According to an October 2023 TechCrunch report, CentML plans to optimize both model training and inference by running models after they’ve been trained.
As per the report, graphics processing units (GPUs) are also heavily used in inference today, and Pekhimenko noted them as a potential avenue of growth for the company.
Other AI Related Acquisitions
In March, Nvidia acquired Gretel, a synthetic data startup, for undisclosed terms. Founded in 2020, Gretel is the generative AI platform for creating synthetic text, tabular, and time series data.
Last December, Nvidia completed acquiring Israeli startup Run:ai, marking its most significant in Israel since its $6.9 billion Mellanox Technologies deal in 2020.
According to a report by Tracxn, NVIDIA has completed 26 acquisitions in over seven countries, most of them in Israel and the United States.
Almost nine companies acquired by the semiconductor giant are in the AI infrastructure and enterprise storage space.
Analyst Opinions
Barclays expects Nvidia, backed by its Blackwell AI platform, to hit a market cap of $5 trillion. The chip company is currently worth $3.8 billion.
Bank of America analyst Vivek Arya estimated that Nvidia holds 80-85% of the total market for AI data center chips. Nvidia’s Blackwell platform prompted Arya to raise his earnings forecast for the calendar year 2027 to $7.23 per share, which is up 12%.
He had projected long-term earnings power of $10 per share, driven by the company’s AI hardware moat.
Nvidia held $53.7 billion in cash and equivalents as of April 27, 2025.
Price Action: NVDA stock is up 0.84% at $156.32 at last check Friday.
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