Meta Platforms plans to hire artificial intelligence investors Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross and partially buy out their venture capital fund, NFDG, The Information reports.

CNBC reports that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had initially tried to acquire Safe Superintelligence (SSI), an AI business started by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever.

After that deal was rejected, Zuckerberg focused on hiring SSI's CEO, Gross. The prominent investor previously led AI efforts at Apple, and served as a partner at Y Combinator.

Gross cofounded investment fund NFDG with Friedman, the former CEO of GitHub and current advisor of Midjourney.

NFDG has stakes in a number of notable AI companies, including SSI, Perplexity, and Character.ai. It previously invested in Weights and Biases, which was acquired by CoreWeave.

Alongside funding the companies, NFDG operates an AI grant program that gives startups $250,000 in funding and $250,000 in Microsoft Azure cloud credits.

In addition, at the height of the GPU shortage, NFDG built its own supercomputer for its portfolio to use.

The Andromeda Cluster launched with 2,512 H100s GPUs, and has since grown to 3,200 H100s on 400 nodes interlinked with 3.2Tbps InfiniBand; 432 H100s on 54 nodes interlinked with 3.2Tbps InfiniBand; and 768 A100s for training and inference with 1.6Tbps InfiniBand.

With compute less constrained, Andromeda is now available for non-NFDG companies, at $2.40-3.00/GPU/hour. "We currently have up to 2,000 H100s available and can give you access to GPUs within a few hours," the cluster's site says.

Alongside potentially hiring Gross and Friedman, Meta is in talks to buy out a substantial portion of NFDG’s holdings and cashing out the fund’s limited partners. The deal, which could cost more than $1bn, will not give Meta control over the investments nor information about the businesses.

What it would mean for the Andromeda Cluster is unclear.

Should the deal go through, it would be part of a wider AI reshuffle at Meta, as CEO Zuckerberg looks to set up a new superintelligence lab and shift its product release strategy.

This month, Meta confirmed that it would spend approximately $14.8 billion on a 49 percent stake in data labeling firm Scale AI and hire its CEO, Alexandr Wang, to join its AI effort.