Nvidia is currently engaged in discussions regarding an investment in Mercor, a provider of data labeling services. Following this round of financing, it is anticipated that Mercor's valuation will skyrocket to US$20 billion. The negotiations are being spearheaded by General Catalyst, an existing investor in the company. Traditionally, Mercor's revenue has primarily stemmed from vendors of closed-source large models. However, there has been a notable surge in revenue from Nvidia in recent times. In the last quarter alone, Nvidia disbursed tens of millions of US dollars to Mercor. Moreover, Mercor's data was utilized in Nvidia's two most recent generations of Nemotron large models, underscoring the deepening collaboration between the two entities. In the first half of this year, Mercor's total revenue amounted to US$614 million, with projections indicating that it could reach US$2 billion for the entire year. The operating profit for this year is expected to be US$226 million, with a projected increase to US$1.7 billion next year. Since its inception, Mercor has secured approximately US$520 million in total funding and is on track to achieve a valuation of US$10 billion by October 2025.
In addition to Mercor, Nvidia also procures data from other third-party sources, maintains an in-house data team, and participated in the financing of Scale AI in 2024. Lately, Nvidia has stepped up its investment activities, both in terms of pace and scale, with the majority of its investment targets being direct customers of its chips. As of the April fiscal quarter, Nvidia had already invested US$18.6 billion and has plans to continue investing in multiple companies through to 2026. It is noteworthy that Nvidia still heavily relies on synthetic data for training its Nemotron models. Additionally, model calls on OpenRouter also furnish valuable data support.