Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, announced on Tuesday a multi-year strategic partnership with Nvidia that commits the company to deploying at least one gigawatt of Nvidia's new Vera Rubin GPU systems starting in 2027.

Nvidia is also making a "significant investment" in Thinking Machines Lab as part of the deal. The partnership includes technical collaboration to optimize TML's AI products for Nvidia hardware and to develop training and serving systems for Nvidia's architecture.

"Nvidia's technology is the foundation on which the entire field is built," Murati said in a statement. "This partnership accelerates our capacity to build AI that people can shape and make their own."

Context

Thinking Machines Lab was founded in February 2025, not long after Murati departed OpenAI — where she served as CTO and briefly as interim CEO during Sam Altman's short-lived 2023 ouster. The startup has raised more than $2 billion from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, and Nvidia itself, at a valuation exceeding $12 billion — a striking number for a seed-stage company that has kept most of its work under wraps.

The company's stated mission is to build AI systems that are "more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable." Its first public product, an API called Tinker, launched in October 2025.

Vera Rubin Scale

One gigawatt of compute is a significant commitment. For context, Nvidia's Vera Rubin systems — announced earlier this year — represent the next generation beyond Blackwell. Securing that volume of next-gen hardware puts Thinking Machines Lab among a very small group of labs with the infrastructure runway to train frontier-scale models.

Whether TML eventually ships a consumer product or model API at that scale remains to be seen, but this deal signals Murati is playing a long game.