Exclusive: Google deepens Thinking Machines Lab ties with new multi-billion-dollar deal
Mira Murati's secretive startup secures single-digit billions in compute for its Tinker AI model builder.
Thinking Machines Lab, the secretive AI startup founded by former OpenAI chief technologist Mira Murati, has secured a massive, multi-billion-dollar cloud deal with Google. The agreement, valued in the single-digit billions according to TechCrunch, grants the lab access to Google Cloud's latest AI infrastructure, including systems powered by Nvidia's new GB300 chips. This hardware offers a reported 2x improvement in training and serving speeds over previous generations, a critical advantage for the lab's work. The deal is not exclusive but represents a significant commitment from Google to support the startup's ambitious development roadmap.
The partnership provides crucial insight into Thinking Machines' technical direction. Google specifically noted the infrastructure will support the lab's reinforcement learning workloads, a computationally expensive training approach that underpins its flagship product, Tinker. Tinker, launched in October 2025, is a tool that automates the creation of custom frontier AI models. This deal follows the lab's $2 billion seed round and a prior partnership with Nvidia, signaling its rapid scaling and the intense competition among cloud giants (Google, Amazon, Microsoft) to secure compute contracts with top AI labs like Anthropic and now Thinking Machines.
- Deal valued in the single-digit billions for access to Google Cloud's Nvidia GB300-powered systems.
- Infrastructure targets reinforcement learning for Tinker, the lab's AI model automation tool, with 2x faster training speeds.
- Represents Google's strategy to lock in a major, well-funded frontier AI lab (valued at $12B) early in its development.
Why It Matters
Highlights the massive compute arms race and strategic cloud partnerships required to build next-generation, frontier AI models.