Recently, NVIDIA acquired the Toronto-based AI startup CentML for $400 million. The company, founded by Chinese-born 95ers Wang Shang and his mentor, specializes in optimizing the performance of AI applications. As Chief Technology Officer, Wang Shang not only led his team back to NVIDIA but also injected new momentum into NVIDIA's CUDA toolchain.
CentML was established in June 2023. Although it has a short history, it quickly made a name for itself, especially in the field of AI model optimization. The company helps users extract higher performance and cost efficiency from existing hardware by integrating software and hardware resources, which perfectly meets the market's urgent demand for efficient GPU usage. In October 2023, NVIDIA jointly invested $27 million with Google's venture capital fund and became a strategic partner of CentML.
The key to this acquisition lies in the strength of CentML's team. In this deal, Wang Shang, along with three other co-founders and 15 engineers, were all brought into NVIDIA. Wang Shang will be responsible for managing AI system software, while the other founders will hold important positions. These young technical talents, especially the 95ers, have shown great potential and creativity in the AI field.
Over the years, Huang Renxun (the founder of NVIDIA) has adopted an active acquisition strategy, acquiring multiple startups in a row to quickly gather top talent, thereby further strengthening NVIDIA's leading position in the AI field. In contrast, Meta CEO Zuckerberg has taken a different approach, offering high salaries to attract core technology teams. It can be said that tech companies in Silicon Valley are engaged in a fierce battle for talent.
Notably, Wang Shang's personal background is quite legendary. He completed his master's and doctoral studies at the University of Toronto and worked as a deep learning engineer at NVIDIA. He has not only achieved significant success in the technical field but has also published relevant papers at multiple academic conferences, proposing innovative solutions to improve the efficiency of training deep learning models.
NVIDIA's recent acquisition is not only a recognition of CentML's team strength, but also opens up new prospects for its AI model optimization and GPU usage. In the future, as this acquisition progresses, NVIDIA is expected to further enhance its competitiveness in the global AI field.