Investor Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has disclosed to potential investors that Thinking Machines Lab, an AI enterprise led by former OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, is in negotiations for a new round of funding. The company plans to raise $5 billion to $6 billion with a pre-investment valuation of at least $40 billion. As a board member of Thinking Machines Lab, a16z stated that NVIDIA is expected to contribute about half of the funding, or $2.5 billion. This marks NVIDIA's latest move in a series of transactions aimed at expanding its influence among open-source AI developers. Previously, NVIDIA had already invested $12.9 billion to acquire the open-source model platform Hugging Face.
