Nvidia backs Poolside with $7bn and XPeng secures $900m for humanoid robots
In August 2026 Nvidia committed $7bn to open‑source AI startup Poolside, while Chinese EV maker XPeng raised over $900m to mass‑produce its IRON humanoid robot; other AI and biotech startups also saw activity.
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Artificial Intelligence
In late August 2026 Nvidia announced a $7bn commitment to open‑source AI startup Poolside, comprising $6bn in non‑exclusive technology licensing fees for Poolside’s Model Factory system and a $1bn equity investment at a $12bn pre‑money valuation, while also absorbing 109 of Poolside’s engineers into its Nemotron open‑weight model project. The deal is structured as a ‘soft acquisition’, keeping Poolside’s founders independent but granting Nvidia access to its model‑building capability and data centre resources needed for frontier model training [4].
Robotics
XPeng’s robotics business secured more than $900m in a financing round that valued the unit at over $6.3bn, the largest private round in China’s embodied AI sector. IDG Capital led the round, with Gaorong Ventures participating and strategic investors Tencent and Alibaba joining. The capital will fund hardware and software R&D, training of Physical AI models, high‑quality data collection, construction of mass‑production facilities and global expansion. XPeng’s IRON humanoid robot features 76 degrees of freedom, 21 per hand, and three in‑house Turing AI chips delivering up to 2,250 TOPS, enabling on‑device foundation‑model inference for autonomous task execution [1][2][3].