In Brief

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 released its first product, an API called Tinker, in October.

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.

Updated after publication to correct that Thinking Machines released its product Tinker last fall.