Nvidia in talks to invest up to $3B in Thinking Machines Lab at $40B+ pre-money valuation
新智元 · wechat · 2026-09-07
Nvidia is reportedly in talks to become the largest backer of Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab, potentially contributing $2.5-3B of a $5-6B round at a pre-money valuation of at least $40B.
Key facts:
- Rapid re-rating: The startup raised a $2B seed round in July 2025 at a $12B post-money valuation; the new round implies a 400x revenue multiple on just over $100M in annualized revenue.
- OpenAI lineage: Co-founders include Lilian Weng, John Schulman, Barret Zoph, and Luke Metz.
- Product and compute: Launched the Tinker fine-tuning platform in October 2025, signed a multi-year deal with Nvidia in March 2026 to deploy at least 1GW of Vera Rubin systems, and released its first model Inkling (975B total params, 41B active, 1M-token context, open weights) in July.
- Circular economics: Nvidia is both the biggest investor and the supplier of the 1GW system; it also agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9B, committing nearly $16B to the open-weights ecosystem within days.
- Positioning: Rather than chasing frontier-model supremacy, the company sells 'making models yours' — custom-model infrastructure for enterprises.
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