The Financial Times reported on Saturday, October 10, that the talks are early and could take several forms. One option is an acqui-hire: Nvidia would hire Reflection staff and license its technology instead of buying the company outright, which could avoid a long antitrust review. Reuters, which carried the report, said it could not verify it. A deal could land within weeks or fall apart. Nvidia is already a major backer, with $800 million invested according to the FT. Former DeepMind researchers Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou founded Reflection in 2024. In April, Laskin told CNBC the company was raising at a $25 billion pre-money valuation. On Monday it released Beam, its first open-weight model, which targets coding and agent tasks and competes with cheaper Chinese models such as DeepSeek and Kimi. For builders, the talks show chip suppliers moving closer to model labs. They also show that licensing plus hiring structures are now a realistic exit for heavily funded labs whose commercial revenue is still early.