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 Nvidia on Tuesday. The size of the deal was not disclosed. It includes the AI research lab deploying at least one gigawatt of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin systems, which were released earlier this year, starting in 2027.
Nvidia is also making a strategic investment in Thinking Machines Lab. The lab has raised more than $2 billion since its February 2025 founding from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, and Nvidia, among others. This list includes the venture arm of rival chipmaker AMD.
The seed-stage company is valued at more than $12 billion. It 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 both companies for more information regarding the specifics of the deal terms and investment. Thinking Machines Lab declined to comment beyond its official release.
The partnership also includes a commitment to develop training and serving systems for Nvidia architecture, according to an Nvidia press release. Mira Murati stated in the announcement that Nvidia’s technology is the foundation on which the entire field is built. She said the partnership accelerates their capacity to build AI that people can shape and make their own.
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 power 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 the value of this specific deal is unknown, it is believable given recent market activity. In 2025, rival OpenAI allegedly inked a historic $300 billion compute deal with Oracle.
This story was updated after publication to correct that Thinking Machines released its product Tinker last fall.