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Exclusive: Google deepens ties with Thinking Machines Lab through new multi-billion-dollar deal

Thinking Machines Lab, the venture founded by ex-OpenAI executive Mira Murati, has secured a multi-billion-dollar contract to leverage Google Cloud’s AI infrastructure, incorporating systems driven by Nvidia’s newest GPUs, TechCrunch has exclusively confirmed.
According to an insider, the agreement is worth several billion dollars and grants access to Google’s latest AI frameworks built on Nvidia’s GB300 chips, along with essential infrastructure for model training and deployment.
Google is aggressively pursuing cloud contracts with AI developers, integrating its cloud services with storage, Kubernetes, and Spanner database solutions. Earlier this month, Anthropic finalized an agreement with Google and Broadcom for multiple gigawatts of tensor processing unit (TPU) capacity, utilizing Google’s custom-designed AI chips for machine learning tasks.
Competition remains intense. This week, Anthropic also entered into a new agreement with Amazon to secure up to 5 gigawatts of capacity for training and deploying Claude.
While Thinking Machines partnered with Nvidia earlier this year, including an investment from the chipmaker, this marks its first agreement with a cloud provider. The deal is non-exclusive, allowing Thinking Machines to utilize multiple cloud providers in the future, yet it signals Google’s strategy to secure fast-growing frontier labs early.
Murati departed OpenAI as chief technologist and established Thinking Machines in February 2025. The company, which raised a $2 billion seed round at a $12 billion valuation shortly after, has maintained strict secrecy but launched its inaugural product in October. Named Tinker, this tool automates the creation of custom frontier AI models.
The Wednesday agreement offers a glimpse into Thinking Machines’ development. Google’s press release highlighted its ability to support the startup’s reinforcement learning workloads, which Tinker’s architecture depends on. This training method has driven recent breakthroughs at labs like DeepMind and OpenAI, and the scale of the Google Cloud deal underscores the high computational costs involved.
Thinking Machines is among the first Google Cloud customers to access its GB300-powered systems, which deliver a 2X improvement in training and serving speed compared to previous-generation GPUs, according to Google.
“Google Cloud got us running at record speed with the reliability we demand,” Myle Ott, a founding researcher at Thinking Machines, stated.
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Thinking Machines Lab, the venture founded by ex-OpenAI executive Mira Murati, has secured a multi-billion-dollar contract to leverage Google Cloud’s AI infrastructure, incorporating systems driven by Nvidia’s newest GPUs, TechCrunch has exclusively confirmed.
According to an insider, the agreement is worth several billion dollars and grants access to Google’s latest AI frameworks built on Nvidia’s GB300 chips, along with essential infrastructure for model training and deployment.
Google is aggressively pursuing cloud contracts with AI developers, integrating its cloud services with storage, Kubernetes, and Spanner database solutions. Earlier this month, Anthropic finalized an agreement with Google and Broadcom for multiple gigawatts of tensor processing unit (TPU) capacity, utilizing Google’s custom-designed AI chips for machine learning tasks.
Competition remains intense. This week, Anthropic also entered into a new agreement with Amazon to secure up to 5 gigawatts of capacity for training and deploying Claude.
While Thinking Machines partnered with Nvidia earlier this year, including an investment from the chipmaker, this marks its first agreement with a cloud provider. The deal is non-exclusive, allowing Thinking Machines to utilize multiple cloud providers in the future, yet it signals Google’s strategy to secure fast-growing frontier labs early.
Murati departed OpenAI as chief technologist and established Thinking Machines in February 2025. The company, which raised a $2 billion seed round at a $12 billion valuation shortly after, has maintained strict secrecy but launched its inaugural product in October. Named Tinker, this tool automates the creation of custom frontier AI models.
The Wednesday agreement offers a glimpse into Thinking Machines’ development. Google’s press release highlighted its ability to support the startup’s reinforcement learning workloads, which Tinker’s architecture depends on. This training method has driven recent breakthroughs at labs like DeepMind and OpenAI, and the scale of the Google Cloud deal underscores the high computational costs involved.
Thinking Machines is among the first Google Cloud customers to access its GB300-powered systems, which deliver a 2X improvement in training and serving speed compared to previous-generation GPUs, according to Google.
“Google Cloud got us running at record speed with the reliability we demand,” Myle Ott, a founding researcher at Thinking Machines, stated.
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