(Reuters) – Nvidia has spent over $900 million to hire Enfabrica CEO Rochan Sankar and other staff at the artificial intelligence hardware startup and to license the company’s technology, CNBC reported on Thursday.

The AI chip giant is paying in cash and stock, CNBC said, citing two people familiar with the arrangement. The deal closed last week and Sankar has already joined Nvidia.

Enfabrica, a Silicon Valley-based chip startup, is tackling one of the biggest technical problems that has emerged in the AI field: how to tie tens of thousands or more chips together with a network to effectively work as a single computer.

If that network is too slow, expensive chips from companies such as Nvidia end up sitting idle and waiting for data.

The startup’s technologies can string together about

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