Enfabrica is a networking-silicon and software startup working on the interconnect layer of large AI clusters — the problem of connecting tens of thousands of accelerators so that they behave as a single computer, since a network that is too slow leaves expensive chips idle waiting for data. It was founded in 2019 by Rochan Sankar and Shrijeet Mukherjee, previously executives at Broadcom and Google respectively, and is headquartered in Mountain View, California; a $115 million Series C led by Spark Capital was announced in November 2024 (Source: techstartups.com). Reuters reported that the company's technology can link roughly 100,000 AI computing chips before the network begins to degrade, and that in July 2025 it released a chip-and-software system aimed at reducing memory-chip cost in data centers (Source: finance.yahoo.com).
Nvidia licence-and-hire transaction
In September 2025 Nvidia paid more than $900 million in cash and stock to hire Enfabrica chief executive Rochan Sankar along with other employees, and to license the company's technology. CNBC first reported the arrangement on September 18, 2025, citing two people familiar with it; the deal had closed the previous week and Sankar had already joined Nvidia (Source: cnbc.com) (Source: finance.yahoo.com).
The structure — licensing a startup's intellectual property and hiring its senior staff without acquiring the corporate entity — is the pattern the Financial Times described as a takeover workaround adopted across the industry, alongside Microsoft's arrangement with Inflection AI and Amazon's with Adept AI's engineering core (How the AI revolution has turbocharged M&A). Nvidia used comparable structures with Groq and Poolside, and considered one for Perplexity before opening discussions in August 2026 on a conventional equity investment instead (Source: theinformation.com).
No antitrust authority has publicly ruled on the Enfabrica arrangement. Debate over whether transactions structured this way fall within the reach of merger review is covered at AI Antitrust.
Relationships
- related: Nvidia & TSMC — AI Compute Infrastructure — licensed Enfabrica's technology and hired its chief executive and other staff in September 2025.
- instance-of: AI Antitrust — one of the licence-and-hire transactions that raised questions about the reach of merger review.
- supports: How the AI revolution has turbocharged M&A — cited there as an instance of the acquihire pattern.
- related: Groq, Poolside, Perplexity — other targets of Nvidia licence-and-hire or investment discussions.