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Thinking Machines Lab, an artificial intelligence startup led by former OpenAI chief technology officer Meera Moratti, has just traded its “error” status for a seat at the big table.
The startup has formed a multi-year strategic partnership with Nvidia, which has also made a “significant investment,” the two announced Tuesday. The terms, though vague, indicate a desire to break the frontier AI.
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Founded as a public benefit corporation in February 2025 by OpenAI veterans, Thinking Machines generated considerable buzz (and envy, at least from these wallets) when it raised $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation just five months later. Participating in the seed round were A-list investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, AMD and Cisco, for whom many patch decks serve as recycled materials. The hype was on.
Thinking Machines emerged from stealth mode in October with its first and so far only product, Tinker, a tool that automates much of the work involved in optimizing large language models. Tinker works with MetaLlama and Alibaba Kevin, both of which are open source, allowing users to perform certain tasks on them: in short, creating their own custom versions of the Frontier model. Beyond that, however, the thinking machine has remained silent on other plans. Tuesday’s deal suggests, at least, they’re not small:
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The financial details of Nvidia’s “significant investment” were not disclosed, but the companies said Thinking Machines will deploy at least 1 gigawatt of new Vera Rubin hardware early next year.
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One gigawatt is enough to power the entire city of San Francisco, about the amount a nuclear power plant produces. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in August 2025 that it would cost $50 billion to $60 billion to build a gigawatt of data center capacity. In other words, the sources assigned here all but scream that Thinking Machines plans to compete in the frontier model space against Anthropic, Google, Open AI, Meta, and Alibaba.
AI will see later: Thinking Machine hasn’t completely avoided the kind of C-Suite drama that ended up at its founder’s former company. (Note the ousting and almost immediate reinstatement of Sam Altman as OpenAI CEO in 2023.) The executive ranks at Thinking Machines are in flux, with co-founder Andrew Tulloch leaving for Meta last year, and co-founders Bert Zoff and Luke Metz rejoining OpenAI in January.
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