Nvidia is in talks to acquire server rental company Lepton AI.
According to a report from The Information, citing unnamed sources, the deal is worth several hundred million dollars.
The companies, according to the publication, are in advanced discussions.
Should it go through, the deal could strengthen Nvidia's cloud-based AI computing services, with The Information suggesting that the company is feeling pressure from cloud providers developing and renting out their own chips at lower prices.
DCD has contacted both Nvidia and Lepton for more information.
Nvidia offers a cloud within a cloud-type offering. Launched in 2023, Nvidia's DGX Cloud is a service offered on top of other companies’ cloud platforms. The cloud providers lease Nvidia's servers and deploy them as a cloud that Nvidia can market and sell to enterprises looking for large GPU supercomputers.
Google, Microsoft, Oracle, and AWS are all adopters of the offering, with AWS only embracing the solution in December 2024.
While it may seem convoluted, to actually develop and offer its own cloud computing platform would position Nvidia as a direct competitor to some of its largest customers - in the Q3 2025 earnings call in November 2024, the company said that "cloud service providers were approximately half of our data center sales with revenue increasing more than 2x year on year."
The company also has a nascent cloud and software business which rents out servers directly to business and provides software for developing AI models and applications. During the same earnings call, Nvidia said its software, service, and support revenue was generating $1.5 billion in annualized revenue.
The company has increased its investment in cloud offerings in the last year. In its May 2024 earnings report, Nvidia said it had committed to spend at least $9 billion on cloud computing services over the next few years - up from a commitment of $4.5 billion in January. That figure includes DGX Cloud.
Lepton AI was founded in 2023 with a seed funding round reaching $11 million. Investors included CRV and Fusion Fund. The company leases servers powered by Nvidia GPUs from cloud providers, and rents them to their own customers.
According to The Information, Lepton has around 20 employees and its customers include gaming startup Latitude.io and SciSpace. Lepton’s co-founders, Yangqing Jia, and Junjie Bai, previously worked together as AI researchers at Meta Platforms.
Earlier this month, reports emerged that Nvidia had acquired synthetic data startup Gretel. Valued at $320 million, the deal was said to be in the nine-figure realm.
