vidia is giving Thinking Machines a much-needed hand.

On Tuesday, the chip giant and the nascent AI lab announced a multiyear strategic partnership, in which Thinking Machines will deploy at least a gigawatt of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin systems to build its models and platforms, starting next year. The startup will also develop training and inference systems for Nvidia architecture.

In addition, Nvidia has made a “significant investment” in the lab to support its growth. Although no numbers were released, Thinking Machines has a valuation of more than $12 billion and has raked in $2 billion in funding since its inception. In November, the company was reportedly seeking to raise another $5 billion at a $50 billion valuation.

“Thinking Machines has brought together a world-class team to advance the frontier of AI,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in the press release. “We are thrilled to partner with Thinking Machines to realize their exciting vision for the future.”

Nvidia’s support follows a turbulent time for Thinking Machines. The company, which is just over a year old, has faced departures of several key employees in recent months:

• In January, the Thinking Machines CEO and OpenAI alum Mira Murati reportedly fired CTO and co-founder Barret Zoph for “poor performance and talking to competitors,” according to The Information. Murati installed Soumith Chintala, co-creator of deep learning framework PyTorch, as the company’s CTO.
• Following that move, four other employees have tendered their resignations, with several of them leaving for OpenAI. Prior to this, Andrew Tulloch, another co-founder of the company, departed for Meta in October.

"Nvidia increasingly acts as both capital provider and capacity allocator to frontier labs, ensuring its most advanced architectures have guaranteed, long-duration demand," Forrester Senior Analyst Alvin Nguyen told The Deep View. "This is not a bet on Thinking Machines’ current products. It’s a bet on optionality, compute leverage, and strategic positioning in a capital‑constrained AI future."

Our Deeper View

It’s a smart move for Nvidia to embed itself with Thinking Machines. The startup is extremely nascent, having only launched one product, a language model fine-tuning platform called Tinker, since its inception. If it skyrockets, Nvidia is the foundation that it leaps from and likely gains a long-term strategic partner. Frontier models are Nvidia's best customers since they demand the latest and most powerful GPUs, so it is very incentivized to help more frontier labs to flourish. However, valuations for these young AI companies are only getting bigger, with firms less than a few years old raking in billions in early-stage funding. The question remains how realistic the expectations are of early companies like Thinking Machines, especially as departures from the firm cast a shadow. That makes this move a high-risk, high-reward situation for Nvidia.