NVIDIA makes ‘significant investment’ in Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab
NVIDIA has made a significant investment in Thinking Machines Lab, a startup founded by Mira Murati, the former CTO of OpenAI, the company announced on March 10, 2026.
Partnership Details
As part of the multiyear strategic partnership, Thinking Machines Lab will deploy at least a gigawatt of NVIDIA’s next-generation Vera Rubin systems to train its models. NVIDIA has also made a significant investment in Thinking Machines, although the exact figure has not been disclosed.
Compute Commitment
The chip supply arrangement alone is worth tens of billions of dollars, according to the Financial Times. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has previously said that one gigawatt of AI data centre capacity costs up to $50 billion.
Thinking Machines Lab Background
Thinking Machines Lab, founded in February 2025, has now raised more than $2 billion since its inception. Investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, and NVIDIA, alongside 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 “more widely understood, customizable and generally capable.” The emphasis on customisability is pointed, as Thinking Machines is positioning itself distinct from OpenAI and Anthropic, which sell relatively fixed products, by building infrastructure that companies and developers can shape to their own requirements.
Quotes from Mira Murati
“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.”
Implications of the Partnership
The partnership with NVIDIA includes technical collaboration as well as compute supply, specifically the optimisation of Thinking Machines’ products for NVIDIA’s hardware. This close integration at the chip level has historically proved valuable, allowing OpenAI to move quickly in the GPT era.
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 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.
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