NVIDIA is in talks to invest roughly $2.5 billion in Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, according to a report by The Information on September 3, 2026 (UTC). If the deal closes, it would mark NVIDIA's second massive AI ecosystem move in less than a week — coming right on the heels of its $12.9 billion acquisition of Hugging Face.
The round: $5–6B at a $40B valuation
Thinking Machines Lab is looking to raise between $5 billion and $6 billion at a pre-money valuation of at least $40 billion, according to details shared by existing investor Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) with potential backers. NVIDIA is expected to contribute approximately half of that total — around $2.5 billion. Accel is separately preparing a $1 billion investment.
For context, the company closed a $2 billion seed round in July 2025 (UTC) at a $12 billion valuation. That was already one of the largest seed rounds in startup history. If this new round closes near $40 billion, Thinking Machines will have more than tripled its valuation in roughly 14 months — before shipping a mainstream product.
Who is Mira Murati, and what is Thinking Machines?
Mira Murati served as OpenAI's CTO from 2023 until her departure in late 2024. She was a central figure in the development of GPT-3, GPT-4, and ChatGPT, and briefly served as interim CEO during the Sam Altman ouster in November 2023.
She founded Thinking Machines Lab in early 2025 with a team of 29 researchers and engineers poached from OpenAI, Google, and Meta. The company's stated mission is to make AI more customizable and accessible — building tools that let users fine-tune models without managing GPU clusters.
Its first product, Tinker, launched in October 2025 (UTC) as a Python API for fine-tuning open-source language models. It's currently in private beta with users at Princeton, Stanford, and other research institutions.
Why NVIDIA keeps writing checks
NVIDIA's investment strategy has shifted dramatically in 2026. The company isn't just selling GPUs anymore — it's buying stakes in the companies that use them. The $12.9 billion Hugging Face acquisition gave NVIDIA control over the world's largest open-source AI model repository. A $2.5 billion stake in Thinking Machines would tie NVIDIA to one of the most anticipated frontier model labs.
The logic is straightforward: whether the next breakthrough comes from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Mistral, or Thinking Machines, NVIDIA wants to be the infrastructure provider — and now, an investor. It's the same playbook that made NVIDIA indispensable during the first wave of AI: don't pick winners, sell picks and shovels to everyone. Now they're adding equity to the shovel sales.
The talks are ongoing, and the size and investor lineup could still change. But at a $40 billion valuation for a company with one API in private beta, one thing is clear: Mira Murati's pedigree alone is still enough to command Silicon Valley's biggest checks.
Sources: The Information, C114Pro, LeBigData, Exame, TradingKey
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