❯ Nvidia said to be in talks to invest $2.5B in Thinking Machines at a $40B-plus valuation

the talksNvidia is in discussions to invest $2.5 billion in Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab at a valuation of at least $40 billion, according to reports. The stated rationale is backing open-weight alternatives to OpenAI and Anthropic.

the backdropThe money lands on a valuation that is being marked down: the company is seeking at least $1 billion at roughly $40 billion pre-money, below the $50 billion-plus it asked for last fall, with Accel discussing leading. It is under two years old with annualized revenue reported in the hundreds of millions. Nvidia, meanwhile, held $99 billion in equity investments as of July 26, against about $7 billion a year earlier.

the structurePutting $2.5 billion into an open-weight lab follows the same logic as buying Hugging Face: open models bind to hardware, not clouds. Backing a third pole beyond the closed duopoly leaves Nvidia’s accelerators a route that no single customer controls. What to watch is whether the investment carries compute purchase terms — if it does, this is still the seller financing the buyer.

▪ SIGNALNvidia funding an open-weight third pole is not buying equity returns, it is buying room not to be squeezed by two closed customers.