On August 20th, as reported by The Information and sources with inside knowledge of the situation, NVIDIA is currently engaged in talks with Mercor, a data annotation service provider, about making an investment. Mercor provides support to NVIDIA in the development of open-source AI models. This investment forms part of Mercor's latest funding round, a round that places the company's valuation at $20 billion. General Catalyst, an existing investor, is in negotiations to spearhead this funding round.

Previously, Mercor's main revenue stream came from developers of closed-source AI models, including the likes of OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. Nevertheless, as NVIDIA steps up its efforts in developing the Nemotron open-source model, which is designed to go head-to-head with the world's top open-source models, the revenue that Mercor receives from NVIDIA has been steadily on the rise. According to sources close to the matter, NVIDIA paid Mercor tens of millions of dollars in the last quarter. Apart from its collaboration with Mercor, NVIDIA also works with other data suppliers and maintains its own internal data team.