Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab Secures Gigawatt-Scale Nvidia Deal
Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, has inked a multi-year compute deal with Nvidia involving at least one gigawatt of compute capacity. The partnership, announced March 10, includes Nvidia's Vera Rubin systems beginning deployment in early 2027, plus a strategic investment from Nvidia.
The scale of the deal is staggering. Industry estimates suggest one gigawatt of compute capacity could cost approximately $50 billion, making this one of the largest AI infrastructure commitments in history. The deal reflects the escalating arms race among AI companies to secure enough computing power to train frontier models.
"Nvidia's technology is the foundation on which the entire field is built," Murati said in a statement. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called AI "the most powerful knowledge discovery instrument in human history."
Thinking Machines Lab has raised over $2 billion since February 2025 at a $12 billion valuation, with investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, and AMD's venture arm. The company is now seeking additional capital that could value it in the tens of billions, according to reports.
The partnership comes as Nvidia projects $3-4 trillion in AI infrastructure spending by the end of the decade. The company has similarly invested in other AI labs including OpenAI and Anthropic, positioning itself as the critical bottleneck—and beneficiary—of the industry's compute hunger.
The deal will support Thinking Machines' focus on AI models with reproducible results, including its first product, the Tinker API released in October 2025. Nvidia will collaborate on training and serving systems for the startup's architecture, aiming to broaden access to frontier AI for enterprises and research institutions.