Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines secures Nvidia investment, 1 gigawatt of AI compute

Silicon Valley’s race for artificial intelligence infrastructure is getting another heavyweight contender. Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati, has secured a multi-year partnership with Nvidia that includes a significant investment and access to an enormous amount of computing capacity.

The deal gives Thinking Machines a path to deploy Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin systems starting early next year. The chips will be used to train the company’s artificial intelligence models, placing the young startup directly into the escalating contest for large-scale AI training infrastructure, Reuters reported.

Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Murati launched Thinking Machines after leaving OpenAI, where she served as chief technology officer and played a central role in developing some of the company’s most influential AI systems. The new startup has drawn intense attention from investors and engineers across the industry, even before releasing a commercial product.

AI startup Thinking Machines clinches capital and a major chip supply deal from Nvidia

The partnership with Nvidia centers on one striking figure: one gigawatt of computing power. Industry executives say a facility of that scale could cost around $50 billion to build and operate. To put that in perspective, a gigawatt is roughly enough electricity to power about 750,000 homes in the United States.

Access to that level of compute is quickly becoming one of the biggest advantages in AI development. Training large models requires enormous GPU clusters that run for weeks or months. Securing the hardware early gives startups a better shot at keeping pace with much larger competitors.

Thinking Machines has moved quickly since its launch. The company raised roughly $2 billion in seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, valuing the startup at $12 billion. Nvidia participated in that round as an investor, deepening the relationship that has now expanded into a long-term infrastructure agreement.

TechStartups previously reported on the company in July 2025 when the seed round closed. At the time, the size of the investment signaled strong confidence from venture capital firms betting on the next wave of AI labs.

The company has continued fundraising discussions in recent months. Sources familiar with the talks told Reuters that Thinking Machines has explored another round that could push its valuation into the tens of billions of dollars.

The startup has not been immune to the intense competition for talent in AI research. Co-founder and former chief technology officer Barret Zoph and co-founder Luke Metz both returned to OpenAI after joining the new venture earlier in its formation.

Even with those departures, Murati’s project remains one of the most closely watched new AI labs in Silicon Valley.

The partnership reflects Nvidia’s growing role across the AI ecosystem. The company has become far more than a chip supplier. It now sits at the center of a capital and infrastructure loop that supports many of the companies building large AI models.

Nvidia recently committed $30 billion to OpenAI and invested $10 billion in Anthropic, supplying the GPUs that power their training clusters. That dynamic has raised questions from analysts who see similarities to the late-1990s tech boom, when massive spending on infrastructure fueled an entire generation of internet companies.

Murati’s Thinking Machines now joins that circle of AI labs building enormous computing capacity in pursuit of the next generation of models. With Nvidia chips lined up and billions already raised, the startup has positioned itself as a serious contender in the escalating race for AI scale.

Thinking Machines Founder and CEO Mira Murati