Nvidia May Put $2.5 Billion Into Thinking Machines Lab, Valuing the Startup at $40 Billion

Nvidia is preparing to pour $2.5 billion into the secretive artificial intelligence startup Thinking Machines Lab, a bet that values the three-year-old company at $40 billion and signals the chip giant's growing anxiety about rivals who might control the next generation of AI reasoning. The investment, if completed, would represent one of the largest venture rounds in startup history and suggests that Nvidia sees reasoning-focused AI as so strategically vital that it cannot risk depending on external developers to get it right. The move also exposes a striking paradox in Silicon Valley: even as Nvidia dominates the trillion-dollar AI chip market, it appears convinced that controlling the software layer—not just the hardware—will determine which

inc.com·Sep 5