“There are talks with Nvidia and others”: Shashua confirms AI21 acquisition discussions
AI21’s chairman confirms interest from Nvidia and additional parties, but believes a deal isn’t imminent.
Amnon Shashua has publicly acknowledged that talks are under way regarding a potential acquisition of AI21 Labs, the artificial-intelligence company he co-founded nearly a decade ago.
“There are talks with Nvidia, there are talks with others, but nothing even close to talking about it in the press,” Shashua said in an interview with Bloomberg.
Calcalist reported last week that AI21 is in talks with Nvidia regarding a deal at a potential value of $2-$3 billion. Shashua’s remarks do not confirm an imminent deal, but they do establish that AI21 is formally in play, and not only with Nvidia.
That acknowledgement comes against the backdrop of a reassessment of AI21’s recent history. For much of 2025, the company was widely portrayed as having raised a $300 million Series D led by Google and Nvidia. As reported last week, that round never closed. AI21’s most recent completed fundraising remains a November 2023 extension of its Series C, which brought total capital raised to $208 million at a valuation of $1.4 billion.
AI21, founded in 2017 by Shashua alongside Professors Yoav Shoham and Ori Goshen, entered the generative-AI race early, but has struggled to keep pace with the acceleration of rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
The company today employs around 200 people, down from 260 in 2023, after plans to significantly expand its workforce were shelved. It has narrowed its focus to enterprise-oriented language models, halting development of its consumer product Wordtune and emphasizing accuracy-driven tools such as Maestro and a recently launched reasoning model. Estimated annual revenue stands at roughly $50 million, largely unchanged since 2023.
Against that backdrop, a sale, particularly to a strategic buyer like Nvidia, would appear to be driven less by AI21’s commercial footprint than by its human capital. The company’s researchers, many with deep academic credentials, represent a scarce resource.
Shashua’s comments also place AI21 alongside another high-profile transaction tied closely to his own portfolio: Mobileye’s $900 million acquisition of Mentee Robotics. That deal, announced on Tuesday, drew attention not only for its size but for Shashua’s dual role as founder, chairman, and largest shareholder of Mentee, holding 37.8% of the company, a stake valued at $341 million in the transaction.
Addressing concerns over governance, Shashua, who is the CEO of Mobileye, was blunt. “It’s called a related-party transaction. It has been done in the past and will be done in the future,” he said. He added that he recused himself from the decision-making process and dismissed suggestions of impropriety tied to his son’s employment at Mentee as immaterial.
What mattered, Shashua argued, was not the optics but the strategic logic. The acquisition reflects Mobileye’s search for new growth engines beyond autonomous driving, and its bet on what Shashua describes as “physical AI.”
“The material part is the scope of AI,” he said. “Physical AI includes humanoids and autonomous driving. Mobileye was always looking throughout the years for growth engines, but we never found something that really clicked… Humanoids is becoming that click.”
