Nvidia invests in Thinking Machines Lab and commits 1 gigawatt of AI compute in massive deal

Thinking Machines Lab inks massive compute deal with Nvidia | TechCrunch

OpenAI co-founder Mira Murati's two-year-old AI research lab has signed a sizable deal with semiconductor giant Nvidia. Murati's Thinking Machines Lab announced it entered into a multi-year strategic partnership with AI semiconductor giant Nvidia on Tuesday. The size of the deal was not disclosed and includes the AI research lab deploying at least one gigawatt of Nvidia's Vera Rubin systems, which was released earlier this year, starting in 2027. Nvidia is also making a strategic investment in Thinking Machines Lab, which has raised more than $2 billion since its February 2025 founding from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, and Nvidia, among others, including rival chipmaker AMD's venture arm. The seed-stage company is valued at more than $12 billion and is working to build AI models that create reproducible results. The company has not released any products. TechCrunch reached out to Thinking Machines Lab and Nvidia for more information regarding the specifics surrounding the deal terms and investment. Thinking Machines Lab declined to comment beyond the release. The partnership also includes a commitment to develop training and serving systems for Nvidia architecture, according to an Nvidia press release. "Nvidia's technology is the foundation on which the entire field is built," Murati said in the deal's blog post. "This partnership accelerates our capacity to build AI that people can shape and make their own, as it shapes human potential in turn." Thinking Machines Lab has seen a number of recent high-profile exits in its young history. The company's co-founder, Andrew Tulloch, left the startup for a role at Meta in October. Earlier this year, three additional co-founders, Barret Zoph, Luke Metz, and Sam Schoenholz, left to return to OpenAI. This deal comes as AI companies remain hungry for any compute that they can get. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang predicted that companies could spend $3 trillion to $4 trillion on AI infrastructure by the end of the decade. While we don't know the value of this specific deal, it's believable. In 2025, rival OpenAI allegedly inked a historic $300 billion compute deal with Oracle.

Nvidia to Invest in Thinking Machines Lab and Supply AI Chips

The companies described the investment as "significant", with Nvidia's chief executive officer saying they are thrilled to partner with Thinking Machines to realize their vision for the future of AI. Nvidia Corp. is making a new investment in Thinking Machines Lab, an artificial intelligence company founded by former OpenAI executive Mira Murati, and will supply chips to help train and run the startup's AI models. Thinking Machines will use Nvidia's forthcoming Vera Rubin AI accelerators as part of a multiyear agreement, the companies said in a statement Tuesday. The chips, which will be deployed by Thinking Machines early next year, will provide computing power amounting to at least 1 gigawatt -- roughly the amount of energy needed to power 750,000 homes. Nvidia, which previously invested in Thinking Machines last year, didn't provide terms of the current deal or discuss whether it will be an infusion of cash, chips or some combination of the two. The companies described the investment as "significant." A Thinking Machines spokesperson declined to elaborate, while a representative for Nvidia didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. The agreement is part of a flurry of investment deals for Nvidia, the world's most valuable company. The chipmaker is using its resources to promote the use of artificial intelligence in a range of industries, helping jump-start what it calls a new industrial revolution. But the deals have drawn scrutiny for their circular nature, with Nvidia taking stakes in its own customers. "Thinking Machines has brought together a world-class team to advance the frontier of AI," Jensen Huang, Nvidia's chief executive officer, said in a statement. "We are thrilled to partner with Thinking Machines to realize their exciting vision for the future of AI." Thinking Machines held talks last year to raise a new round of funds at a $50 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported in November. That would quadruple the startup's valuation from July, when it raised $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation. "This partnership accelerates our capacity to build AI that people can shape and make their own, as it shapes human potential in turn," Murati said in the statement. Under Murati, a tech executive who previously served as chief technology officer at OpenAI, Thinking Machines hired dozens of employees from the ChatGPT maker and rolled out its first product, Tinker, in October. That service helps users fine-tune large language models, the technology that powers chatbots such as ChatGPT. In more recent months, Thinking Machines has lost some employees to OpenAI, including its chief technology officer.

AI startup Thinking Machines clinches capital and a major chip supply deal from Nvidia

March 10 (Reuters) - AI startup Thinking Machines Lab said on Tuesday it has struck a multi-year partnership with Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab that will see it receive a significant investment and procure at least one gigawatt of the chipmaker's next-generation processors. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Under the agreement, Thinking Machines - founded last year by former OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati - will deploy Nvidia's upcoming Vera Rubin systems starting early next year. The computing power will primarily be used to train the startup's artificial intelligence models. Industry executives have said ⁠1 gigawatt of computing power, enough to power roughly 750,000 U.S. homes, can cost around $50 billion. The deal will help Thinking Machines compete with larger rivals in building powerful AI systems, and underscores the industry's eagerness to scale computing capacity. Thinking Machines quickly became one of Silicon Valley's most closely watched AI startups after raising about $2 billion in a seed funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz that valued the company at $12 billion. Nvidia was also an investor in the round. The startup has recently been seeking to raise ⁠more in a new funding round that could value it at tens of billions of dollars, sources told Reuters earlier. The company has recently seen several departures, including co-founder and former Chief Technology Officer Barret Zoph and co-founder Luke Metz, who both returned to their former employer ⁠OpenAI amid fierce competition for AI talent. The partnership also highlights Nvidia's growing role as a financier of the startups that rely on its AI chips. It has made a recent $30 billion investment ⁠in OpenAI and invested $10 billion in Anthropic, while also supplying the graphics processing units (GPUs) used to train and run their models, a dynamic that some industry analysts ⁠say creates a circular flow of capital and computing resources. That in turn has given rise to comparisons with the late 1990s tech bubble. Reporting by Krystal Hu in San Francisco; Additional reporting by Deepa Seetharaman; Editing by Edwina Gibbs Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab * Suggested Topics: * Artificial Intelligence Krystal Hu Thomson Reuters Krystal reports on venture capital and startups for Reuters. She covers Silicon Valley and beyond through the lens of money and characters, with a focus on growth-stage startups, tech investments and AI. She has previously covered M&A for Reuters, breaking stories on Trump's SPAC and Elon Musk's Twitter financing. Previously, she reported on Amazon for Yahoo Finance, and her investigation of the company's retail practice was cited by lawmakers in Congress. Krystal started a career in journalism by writing about tech and politics in China. She has a master's degree from New York University, and enjoys a scoop of Matcha ice cream as much as getting a scoop at work.

Nvidia makes 'significant investment' in Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab

Thinking Machines Lab is an artificial intelligence startup that Murati founded last year, and it aims to make AI systems that are "more widely understood, customizable and generally capable," according to its website. The company has kept its work largely under wraps and has shared few details about its long-term ambitions. Nvidia has been one of the biggest winners of the AI boom because it makes the graphics processing units that are necessary to train models and run large workloads. It's invested in a number of prominent AI startups in recent years, including OpenAI and Anthropic, which are also customers. Murati is the former CTO of OpenAI, and she served as the company's interim CEO when Sam Altman was briefly ousted in 2023. She departed OpenAI the following year and has remained largely out of the public eye since then.

Thinking Machines Lab secures NVIDIA investment

The deal pairs one of the world's most powerful chip companies with the AI startup founded by OpenAI's former CTO, and the compute commitment alone runs to tens of billions of dollars. When Mira Murati left OpenAI in September 2024, she declined to say much about what came next. What has become clear, roughly 18 months on, is that she was building something with serious ambitions, and that she has found in Nvidia a partner prepared to back them at a scale that would have seemed extravagant even a year ago. On March 10, 2026, NVIDIA and Thinking Machines Lab announced a multiyear strategic partnership under which Murati's startup will deploy at least a gigawatt of NVIDIA's next-generation Vera Rubin systems to train its models. NVIDIA has also made what both companies describe as a "significant investment" in Thinking Machines, though neither has disclosed the figure. According to the Financial Times, the chip supply arrangement alone is worth tens of billions of dollars. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has previously said that one gigawatt of AI data centre capacity costs up to $50 billion. Thinking Machines Lab, which Murati founded in February 2025, has now raised more than $2 billion since its inception. Investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, and NVIDIA, alongside, somewhat unusually, the venture arm of AMD, NVIDIA's principal chip rival. The company has grown from roughly 30 employees a year ago to about 120 today. The company's stated mission is to build AI systems that are, in its own words, "more widely understood, customizable and generally capable." The emphasis on customisability is pointed: Murati and her team appear to be positioning Thinking Machines as something distinct from OpenAI and Anthropic, which sell relatively fixed products, by building infrastructure that companies and developers can shape to their own requirements. The partnership with NVIDIA includes technical collaboration as well as compute supply, specifically the optimisation of Thinking Machines' products for NVIDIA's hardware. That kind of close integration at the chip level has historically proved valuable, it is, in rough terms, part of what allowed OpenAI to move as quickly as it did in the GPT era. "NVIDIA's technology is the foundation on which the entire field is built," Murati said in a statement accompanying the announcement. "This partnership accelerates our capacity to build AI that people can shape and make their own." Thinking Machines is not the only frontier lab signing gigawatt-scale compute agreements. The broader AI industry is locked in a race to secure the infrastructure necessary to train the next generation of models, and the deals being signed now, in some cases before the hardware even exists, reflect a bet that whoever secures the most compute earliest will have a durable advantage. For NVIDIA, the investment serves a dual purpose: it generates revenue from chip sales while also giving the company a stake in a lab it clearly views as a potential long-term customer and strategic partner. NVIDIA has made similar investments in other AI companies, building a portfolio that tracks the industry's frontier. Murati, for her part, turned down an acquisition offer from Meta's Mark Zuckerberg last year. The NVIDIA partnership suggests she intends to remain independent, and that she has secured the resources to make that case credibly. Whether a 120-person lab can genuinely compete with organisations ten times its size remains to be seen. But she is no longer short of compute to try.

NVIDIA and Thinking Machines Lab Announce Long-Term Gigawatt-Scale Strategic Partnership

NVIDIA and Thinking Machines Lab announced today a multiyear strategic partnership to deploy at least one gigawatt of next-generation NVIDIA Vera Rubin systems to support Thinking Machines' frontier model training and platforms delivering customizable AI at scale. Deployment on the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform is targeted for early next year. The partnership also includes an effort to design training and serving systems for NVIDIA architectures and broaden access to frontier AI and open models for enterprises, research institutions and the scientific community. NVIDIA has also made a significant investment in Thinking Machines Lab to support the company's long-term growth. "AI is the most powerful knowledge discovery instrument in human history," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "Thinking Machines has brought together a world-class team to advance the frontier of AI. We are thrilled to partner with Thinking Machines to realize their exciting vision for the future of AI." "NVIDIA's technology is the foundation on which the entire field is built," said Mira Murati, cofounder and CEO of Thinking Machines. "This partnership accelerates our capacity to build AI that people can shape and make their own, as it shapes human potential in turn." Building powerful AI systems that are understandable, customizable and collaborative demands advances in research, design and infrastructure at scale. This partnership provides that foundation, with the shared aim of ensuring that the most transformative technology of our time expands human capability.

Nvidia backs Thinking Machines with compute and capital

Why it matters: A gigawatt of compute -- a threshold only the largest AI labs have approached -- signals the former OpenAI exec intends to compete at frontier scale, not just build tools on top of others' models. Driving the news: The companies announced a multiyear partnership under which Thinking Machines will deploy at least a gigawatt of Nvidia's Vera Rubin systems to train its models and run products it says users can adapt to their own needs. * Nvidia made what the two companies called a "significant investment," though they declined to disclose the size of the stake. * The deal also includes some technical collaboration, including optimizing Thinking Machine Lab's products for Nvidia's chips. What they're saying: "Nvidia's technology is the foundation on which the entire field is built," Murati, Thinking Machines' CEO, said in a statement. * "This partnership accelerates our capacity to build AI that people can shape and make their own, as it shapes human potential in turn." * "AI is the most powerful knowledge discovery instrument in human history," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement. * "Thinking Machines has brought together a world-class team to advance the frontier of AI." Between the lines: Thinking Machines has released one product, Tinker, but has said little about its broader plans, including when it might launch its expected frontier models. * The Nvidia announcement contains a few hints, including both the compute commitment and timing, as well as words that reaffirm the company is focused on creating tools that work directly with humans, rather than on full automation. The big picture: The Nvidia deal follows a series of high-profile departures since the company was announced roughly a year ago. * Co-founder Andrew Tulloch left for a job at Meta last year. * In January, Murati said the company had parted ways with CTO Barret Zopf. Less than an hour later, OpenAI's CEO of Applications, Fidji Simo, said that Zopf and Luke Metz, another Thinking Machines co-founder, were re-joining OpenAI. Zoom in: The company has grown from about 30 employees a year ago to roughly 120 today, with more hires coming from top AI labs than leaving for rivals, according to a source close to the company. The bottom line: The deal is the clearest signal yet of how big -- and how soon -- the former OpenAI exec plans to scale.

Nvidia and Thinking Machines Lab draw multi-year chip deal

Nvidia has also made a 'significant' investment in Thinking Machines to support its long-term growth. In a new multi-year partnership announced today (10 March), Thinking Machines Lab will be using Nvidia's systems to train its AI frontier models. Deployment on Nvidia's Vera Rubin platform is set to begin early next year. Mira Murati launched her AI start-up Thinking Machines in early 2025, less than six months after quitting as OpenAI's chief technology officer. By July 2025, the start-up had already hit $12bn in value after a $2bn seed round, all before it released its first product. The start-up's flagship product 'Tinker' is a training API for fine-tuning open source models, designed for researchers and developers. Tinker can be used for a broad range of models, including Llama-3.2B, Qwen3.5, DeepSeek-V3.1 and Kimi-K2. "Thinking Machines has brought together a world-class team to advance the frontier of AI," said Nvidia CEO and founder Jensen Huang. Huang has previously said that one gigawatt of AI data centre capacity costs up to $50bn, which would place the latest deal's value to several billion dollars. In addition, the company has also made a "significant" investment in Thinking Machines to support its long-term growth. "Nvidia's technology is the foundation on which the entire field is built," said Murati, Thinking Machines' CEO. "This partnership accelerates our capacity to build AI that people can shape and make their own, as it shapes human potential in turn." This is the latest in a long range of supports Nvidia has been providing to fuel the AI race. The $4.4trn chipmaking giant participated in a freshly announced $1.03bn seed round into Advanced Machine Intelligence, supported Nscale in its $2bn Series C raise, and pumped $30bn into OpenAI (possibly its last time before OpenAI goes public). Last month, Meta promised Nvidia billions of dollars on a multi-year partnership to support its data centre build-out. Meanwhile, Nvidia has been looking ahead to ensure an AI-ready 6G infrastructure with a new partnership with telecommunication giants from around the globe. Don't miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic's digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Forget OpenAI. Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Just Secured a Historic Nvidia Deal

In a statement, Thinking Machines and Nvidia said that they had inked "a multi-year strategic partnership to deploy at least one gigawatt of next-generation Nvidia Vera Rubin systems to support Thinking Machines' frontier model training and platforms delivering customizable AI at scale." The announcement comes following a period of turmoil for Thinking Machines. In January, Murati fired cofounder Barret Zoph, reportedly for having a relationship with an employee. But immediately after his firing, Zoph and several other Thinking Machines employees secured new jobs at OpenAI. So far, Thinking Machines' only product is an API service called Tinker. The Tinker API enables developers to more easily customize and fine-tune AI models for specific use cases. The company is expected to release more products, all themed around the idea of customizable models, in the near future.

AI startup Thinking Machines clinches capital and a major chip supply deal from Nvidia

Thinking Machines Lab, a new AI startup, has secured a major partnership with Nvidia. This deal includes significant investment and access to Nvidia's advanced processors. The collaboration will power Thinking Machines' AI model training. This move highlights the intense competition and demand for computing power in the AI industry. AI startup Thinking Machines Lab said on Tuesday it has struck a multi-year partnership with Nvidia that will see it receive a significant investment and procure at least one gigawatt of the chipmaker's next-generation processors. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Under the agreement, Thinking Machines - founded last year by former OpenAI Chief Technology ⁠Officer ⁠Mira Murati - will deploy Nvidia's upcoming Vera Rubin systems starting early next year. The computing power will primarily be used to train the startup's artificial intelligence models. Industry executives have said 1 gigawatt of computing power, enough to power roughly 750,000 U.S. homes, can cost around $50 billion. The deal will help Thinking Machines compete with larger rivals in building powerful AI systems, and underscores ⁠the industry's eagerness to scale computing capacity. Thinking Machines quickly became one of Silicon Valley's most closely watched AI startups after raising about $2 billion in ⁠a seed funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz that valued the company at $12 billion. Nvidia was also an investor in the round. The startup has recently been seeking to raise more in a new funding round that could value it at tens of billions of dollars, sources told Reuters earlier. The company has recently seen several departures, including co-founder and former Chief Technology Officer Barret Zoph and co-founder Luke Metz, who both returned to their former employer OpenAI amid fierce competition for AI talent. The partnership also highlights Nvidia's growing role as a financier ⁠of the startups that rely on its AI chips. It has made a recent $30 billion investment in OpenAI and invested $10 billion in Anthropic, while also supplying the graphics processing units (GPUs) used to train and run their models, a dynamic that some industry analysts say creates a circular flow of capital and computing resources. That in turn has given rise to comparisons with the late 1990s tech bubble.

Nvidia Invests In Mira Murati's AI Startup Thinking Machines - NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA)

The partnership commits to deploying at least one gigawatt of next-generation Nvidia Vera Rubin systems. These will power Thinking Machines' frontier model training and enterprise AI platforms. Deployment is targeted for early next year. The agreement also includes joint efforts to design training and serving systems for NVIDIA architectures. It aims to broaden access to frontier AI and open models for enterprises, research institutions and the scientific community. Jensen Huang Speaks on the Vision Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said. "Thinking Machines has brought together a world-class team to advance the frontier of AI. We are thrilled to partner with Thinking Machines to realize their exciting vision for the future of AI." Murati, cofounder and CEO of Thinking Machines said. "This partnership accelerates our capacity to build AI that people can shape and make their own, as it shapes human potential in turn." Background: A Startup Under Pressure Heath wrote that the company "lacks a clear product/business" direction. Sources also told him that "at least a few employees resigned after a tense all-hands meeting." Murati founded Thinking Machines in early 2025 after leaving OpenAI in late 2024. She served briefly as OpenAI's interim CEO during Sam Altman's temporary ouster in November 2023 before returning to her CTO role. NVDA Price Action: Nvidia shares were up 0.62% at $183.79 at the time of publication on Tuesday, according to Benzinga Pro data. Photo Courtesy: Below the Sky on Shutterstock.com This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors. Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs To add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here.

Nvidia Invests in Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. Per a Tuesday (March 10) blog post, the agreement includes plans for Thinking Machines Lab to deploy at least 1 gigawatt of Nvidia chips for AI training and inference. The companies will also collaborate on designing artificial intelligence training and serving systems built on Nvidia technology, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal. The size and structure of Nvidia's investment have not been made public. The partnership provides the young AI lab with access to the computing infrastructure required to develop and operate large-scale AI models, and deepens its existing use of Nvidia hardware. Nvidia's technology "is the foundation on which the entire field is built," Thinking Machines Co-founder and CEO Murati said in the announcement. "This partnership accelerates our capacity to build AI that people can shape and make their own, as it shapes human potential in turn." "Thinking Machines has brought together a world-class team to advance the frontier of AI," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in the announcement. Murati founded Thinking Machines after she left OpenAI, where she had served as chief technology officer and helped oversee the development of several of the company's major AI systems. She launched the new research lab with a group of former colleagues as the industry sees the emergence of new independent AI labs competing to build frontier models. Murati has said the company's larger goal is to build AI systems that work alongside humans rather than operating independently. The company has also been recruiting aggressively as it builds out its research team. According to The Information, the company has already seen some turnover within its leadership. Co-founder Andrew Tulloch left the startup in October and is returning to Meta, where he worked for 13 years before leaving in 2023 to join OpenAI. Despite the high-profile founding team and strong investor backing, Thinking Machines Lab has revealed little publicly regarding its long-term strategy or commercialization plans. So far, the company has released only one product: a training API called Tinker, unveiled in October 2025, to help researchers and organizations train and fine-tune AI models.

NVIDIA Invests in Thinking Machines Lab, Plans 1GW AI Chip Deployment Worth Billions

Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab Builds AI Team of Former OpenAI Researchers as NVIDIA Supplies 1GW Chips for New Models NVIDIA has made a major investment in Thinking Machines Lab, the artificial intelligence startup founded by Mira Murati. The partnership signals a new phase in the race to build powerful frontier AI models. According to reports, the agreement includes the deployment of at least 1 gigawatt of NVIDIA's . These processors will power training systems and large-scale AI computing infrastructure. Industry observers view the project as one of the largest AI infrastructure commitments in recent years. The partnership also covers joint work on AI training systems. Engineers from both companies plan to design platforms that run and deploy next-generation models with greater efficiency. Financial details of the NVIDIA investment remain undisclosed. However, analysts expect the chip supply deal to reach tens of billions of dollars. The announcement arrived days before NVIDIA's annual developer gathering, the GTC conference in San Jose. Investors reacted quickly. NVIDIA shares moved higher following the news, reflecting strong confidence in the company's growing AI ecosystem.

Nvidia and Mira Murati's Thinking Machines announce gigawatt-scale AI partnership By Investing.com

Investing.com -- NVIDIA and Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab have entered a multi-year strategic partnership to deploy at least one gigawatt of next-generation Vera Rubin systems, according to an announcement Tuesday. This massive infrastructure play aims to support the training of frontier models and provide customizable AI platforms at an unprecedented scale. The collaboration marks a significant expansion for Thinking Machines, the public benefit corporation founded by Murati in early 2025. Beyond hardware, the deal includes a "significant investment" from NVIDIA to bolster the startup's long-term growth and research capabilities. Murati, formerly CTO of OpenAI, has quickly positioned her new venture as a challenger in the AI race. Thinking Machines previously secured a $2 billion seed round that valued the firm at $12 billion just months after its inception. The partnership focuses on designing specialized training and serving systems while broadening access to open models for enterprises and the scientific community. Thinking Machines plans to utilize these NVIDIA architectures to enhance its "Tinker" fine-tuning API and other core human-AI interaction tools. "AI is the most powerful knowledge discovery instrument in human history," stated Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, regarding the massive hardware commitment. He noted that the world-class team assembled by Murati is essential to advancing the current frontier of artificial intelligence. Murati emphasized that the alliance provides the necessary foundation for building understandable and collaborative AI systems. "NVIDIA's technology is the foundation on which the entire field is built," she said, adding that the partnership accelerates the capacity to build AI that people can shape. Nvidia has not yet responded to Investing.com's request for comment. The company's stock is up 1.7% in late morning trade.

Nvidia invests in Mira Murati's AI start-up Thinking Machines Lab

The US group is stepping up its artificial intelligence strategy by backing the young company founded by the former OpenAI executive. Nvidia has announced that it has made a "significant investment" in Thinking Machines Lab, an artificial intelligence start-up created last year by Mira Murati. The deal is part of a multi-year strategic partnership between the companies. The company says it aims to design AI systems that are more understandable, customizable and high-performing. It remains highly discreet about its plans, however, and has so far provided only limited information about its long-term goals. The partnership notably includes the deployment of at least 1 gigawatt of Nvidia's Vera Rubin systems, an advanced generation of computing technologies intended for training AI models. The equipment is expected to be delivered in H2. Nvidia, whose GPUs are widely used in artificial intelligence infrastructure, is increasing its investments in the sector. The company already counts amongst the partners or investors of firms such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Thinking Machines Lab launched a first product in October called Tinker, an API that allows researchers and developers to train and fine-tune AI models. The start-up had already raised $2bn from investors in July. Mira Murati, OpenAI's former CTO and briefly interim chief executive in 2023, left the company in 2024 before setting up her own venture.

AI startup Thinking Machines clinches capital and a major chip supply deal from Nvidia

March 10 (Reuters) - AI startup Thinking Machines Lab said on Tuesday it has struck a multi-year partnership with Nvidia that will see it receive a significant investment and procure at least one gigawatt of the chipmaker's next-generation processors. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Under the agreement, Thinking Machines - founded last year by former OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati - will deploy Nvidia's upcoming Vera Rubin systems starting early next year. The computing power will primarily be used to train the startup's artificial intelligence models. Industry executives have said 1 gigawatt of computing power, enough to power roughly 750,000 U.S. homes, can cost around $50 billion. The deal will help Thinking Machines compete with larger rivals in building powerful AI systems, and underscores the industry's eagerness to scale computing capacity. Thinking Machines quickly became one of Silicon Valley's most closely watched AI startups after raising about $2 billion in a seed funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz that valued the company at $12 billion. Nvidia was also an investor in the round. The startup has recently been seeking to raise more in a new funding round that could value it at tens of billions of dollars, sources told Reuters earlier. The company has recently seen several departures, including co-founder and former Chief Technology Officer Barret Zoph and co-founder Luke Metz, who both returned to their former employer OpenAI amid fierce competition for AI talent. The partnership also highlights Nvidia's growing role as a financier of the startups that rely on its AI chips. It has made a recent $30 billion investment in OpenAI and invested $10 billion in Anthropic, while also supplying the graphics processing units (GPUs) used to train and run their models, a dynamic that some industry analysts say creates a circular flow of capital and computing resources. That in turn has given rise to comparisons with the late 1990s tech bubble. (Reporting by Krystal Hu in San Francisco; Additional reporting by Deepa Seetharaman; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)