Nvidia Invests in Mira Murati's AI Startup Thinking Machines

NVDA announced a "significant investment" in Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, alongside a multibillion-dollar chip supply deal. Under the agreement, Thinking Machines will deploy at least a gigawatt of Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin systems — a compute threshold that only the largest AI labs have approached — to train frontier AI models beginning early next year.

Thinking Machines Lab has raised more than $2 billion since its February 2025 founding from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, and Nvidia. The gigawatt-scale commitment signals that Murati intends to compete at frontier scale rather than simply build applications on top of existing models. The deal also includes technical collaboration to optimize Thinking Machines' products specifically for Nvidia's chip architecture.

The partnership is strategically significant for both parties. For Nvidia, it secures a major long-term customer for its upcoming Vera Rubin platform and extends its dominance in AI training infrastructure. For Thinking Machines, guaranteed access to cutting-edge compute removes one of the biggest bottlenecks for AI startups attempting to train competitive foundation models. The deal reflects the broader trend of Nvidia using strategic investments to lock in demand for its next-generation chips.