The two-year-old AI Research Institute, founded by OpenAI co-founder Mira Murati, has signed a major contract with semiconductor giant Nvidia.
Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab on Tuesday announced a multi-year strategic partnership with AI semiconductor giant Nvidia. The size of the deal was not disclosed, but includes the AI Institute deploying at least 1 gigawatt of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin system, which was released earlier this year, starting in 2027.
Nvidia has also made a strategic investment in Thinking Machines Lab, which has raised more than $2 billion since its founding in February 2025 from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, and Nvidia, including the venture arm of rival chipmaker AMD.
This seed-stage company is valued at over $12 billion and works to build AI models that produce repeatable results. The company released its first product, an API called Tinker, in October.
TechCrunch has reached out to Thinking Machines Lab and Nvidia for more information about the deal terms and investment. Thinking Machines Lab declined to comment after the release.
According to an Nvidia press release, the partnership also includes efforts to develop training and service delivery systems for Nvidia architectures.
“NVIDIA technology is the foundation on which this entire field is built,” Murati said in a blog post about the deal. “This partnership accelerates our ability to build AI that people can shape and make their own, which in turn shapes human potential.”
Thinking Machines Lab has seen a number of high-profile exits recently 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 more co-founders, Barret Zoph, Luke Metz, and Sam Schoenholz, left to return to OpenAI.
The deal comes as AI companies continue to hunger for every bit of computing available. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang predicted that companies could spend $3 trillion to $4 trillion on AI infrastructure by the end of this decade.
I don’t know the value of this specific deal, but it’s believable. In 2025, rival OpenAI reportedly signed a historic $300 billion computing deal with Oracle.
Updated after publication to correct that Thinking Machines released their product Tinker last fall.
