Nvidia is reportedly weighing a $2.5 billion investment in Thinking Machines Lab that would value the startup at roughly $40 billion.
The AMW Read
A reported $2.5B check at a $40B valuation from a strategic chipmaker is a major capital-cycle signal for an already-tracked foundation model lab, meaningfully raising its market standing beyond incremental funding news.
Nvidia is reportedly weighing a $2.5 billion investment in Thinking Machines Lab that would value the startup at roughly $40 billion.
Thinking Machines Lab was founded in 2025 by Mira Murati, OpenAI's former CTO, and has already drawn significant capital: the company carries roughly $2.0 billion in tracked funding per the AI Market Watch index, whose coverage spans about 5,000 companies rather than a full census. A reported Nvidia check at a $40 billion mark would mark a sharp step up from that base and comes just weeks after the company's first public product move — the July release of Inkling, an open-weight, 975-billion-parameter model that positioned itself on customization and cost efficiency rather than chasing top benchmark scores. Nvidia's reported interest fits a pattern of chipmakers writing strategic equity checks into pedigreed foundation-model labs, betting on founding-team credibility and research trajectory well ahead of any proven large-scale commercial product.
For investors, the reported terms underscore how far founder pedigree alone can carry a valuation in the current foundation-model market: Thinking Machines Lab has shipped one open-weight model and is already being discussed at a scale comparable to labs with years of commercial deployment behind them. For builders and competing labs, it raises the bar on what counts as fundraising momentum and signals that strategic infrastructure investors are treating early access to frontier research talent as valuable in its own right, independent of near-term revenue.
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