Thinking Machines Lab signs multibillion-dollar Google Cloud deal

Thinking Machines Lab, the startup founded by former OpenAI executive Mira Murati, has signed a multibillion-dollar agreement to expand its use of Google Cloud’s AI infrastructure. According to a source familiar with the matter, the deal is valued in the single-digit billions. The agreement represents the first time the lab has struck a deal with a cloud services provider.

The agreement is not exclusive, meaning Thinking Machines may use multiple cloud providers over time. However, the deal highlights Google’s strategy to lock in fast-growing frontier labs early. Google has been actively striking cloud deals with AI developers to bundle its AI computing offerings with other cloud services, including storage, a Kubernetes engine, and Spanner, its database product. Competition for these infrastructure deals remains intense. Earlier this month, competitor Anthropic signed an agreement with Google and Broadcom for tensor processing unit (TPU) capacity. Just this week, Anthropic also signed a new agreement with Amazon to secure up to 5 gigawatts of capacity for training and deploying its Claude model.

Under the new agreement, Thinking Machines is among the first Google Cloud customers to access systems powered by Nvidia’s GB300 chips, an Nvidia chip model. Google claims these systems offer a 2X improvement in training and serving speed compared to prior-generation graphics processing units. The infrastructure will support the startup’s reinforcement learning workloads—a training approach for AI models. “Google Cloud got us running at record speed with the reliability we demand,” said Myle Ott, a founding researcher at Thinking Machines.

Murati founded Thinking Machines in February 2025. Earlier this year, the startup partnered with Nvidia in a deal that included an investment from the chipmaker. In October, the company launched its first product, Tinker, which is a tool that automates the creation of custom frontier AI models. The startup’s financial milestones include:

• A $2 billion seed round
• A $12 billion valuation

Why it matters

The deal underscores Google’s strategy to secure early partnerships with high-growth AI labs while highlighting the massive computational costs required for modern reinforcement learning workloads.