NVIDIA is today worth far more than Facebook, but there was a point when Facebook had considered acquiring the chipmaker.
Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus and Anduril, has revealed that Facebook, during its acquisition of Oculus, contemplated acquiring NVIDIA when its valuation was a comparatively modest $4 billion. This revelation paints a fascinating picture of a technological landscape where the future was far from certain, and the giants of today could have easily taken a vastly different path. Luckey’s insight raises questions about the “what ifs” of the tech world and highlights the often unpredictable nature of innovation and market trends.
“There was a time where Oculus was acquired by Facebook, and there was a point where we were considering acquiring Nvidia,” Palmer Luckey said on a podcast. Oculus would’ve acquired NVIDIA, and it would’ve then become a part of Facebook.
“I mean you got to remember that sounds crazy, but remember that when you go back to that point in time where we were acquired, Nvidia is worth like four billion dollars, I mean like it’s not that crazy,” he says.
He then explains the viability of the deal: “And remember, you don’t have to buy the whole company, they were publicly traded, so you just need to take a the dominant position (in its stock). You don’t have to necessarily buy out every share. And so I mean we were like looking at a low single digit million investment to have control of it.”
As it turns out, the deal never materialized. NVIDIA, though, saw its stock zoom with the advent of generative AI, and became the most valuable company in the world in 2024. While it’s since lost that position, it’s still worth nearly twice as much as Meta.
Luckey says that NVIDIA might not have maintained the same trajectory had it been acquired by Facebook. “Now people people have often looked back said, oh my God, imagine if we would have done that, imagine how what a big deal that would have been. My point to them is if we had bought Nvidia they never would have turned into what they are today. They would have been focused more on our VR processing, they wouldn’t have focused on Cluster Computing, they wouldn’t have focused on crypto, and then they wouldn’t have gotten extremely lucky and that their crypto architecture happened to be exactly what you need to scale large language.”
But there have been many such missed acquisitions in history. Yahoo once had the opportunity to buy Google and Microsoft once was looking to buy Facebook. But in this case, the results could’ve been much more profound — there’s no telling if the current AI revolution would’ve taken place if the acquisition had actually gone through.