Thinking Machines Lab secures Google deal amid Meta talent war

Thinking Machines Lab has signed a multibillion-dollar cloud deal with Google, positioning the artificial intelligence startup as a major infrastructure player. Announced this past Tuesday at the Google Cloud Next conference, the agreement provides the startup with access to Nvidia’s GB300 chip model, making it one of the first startups to run on the hardware. The deal places Thinking Machines Lab in the same infrastructure tier as Anthropic and Meta. Alongside this infrastructure expansion, Thinking Machines Lab is currently valued at $12 billion.

The startup’s growth comes amid an active, two-way talent war with Meta. Last year, Meta reportedly held talks to acquire Thinking Machines. More recently, the competition has shifted to personnel. Business Insider reported that Meta has poached seven of Thinking Machines Lab’s founding members. However, a review of LinkedIn profiles indicates that Thinking Machines Lab appears to be “raiding Meta right back,” hiring more researchers from Meta than from any other single employer to build its headcount of around 140 employees.

The startup has drawn heavily from Meta’s research and engineering ranks. Key recent additions to the team include:

• Soumith Chintala (CTO): Spent 11 years at Meta and co-founded PyTorch, the open source deep learning framework. He left Meta in late 2025 and was appointed CTO earlier this year.
• Piotr Dollár: An 11-year Meta veteran who served as a research director and co-authored the Segment Anything AI model for image segmentation.
• Weiyao Wang: Joined recently after spending eight years at Meta working on multimodal perception systems and open-world segmentation. His final day at Meta was last week.
• James Sun: A software engineer who spent nearly nine years at Meta working on large language model pre- and post-training.
• Kenneth Li: A Harvard PhD who spent 10 months at Meta before joining the startup this month.
• Andrea Madotto: A research scientist from FAIR (the Fundamental AI Research division at Meta) who joined in December.

Thinking Machines Lab has also recruited from other technology firms. Recent hires include Neal Wu, a three-time gold medalist at the International Olympiad in Informatics (a competitive programming competition) and a founding member of coding startup Cognition; Jeffrey Tao, who joined via Waymo (an autonomous driving technology company), Windsurf (a software company), and OpenAI (an AI research organization); Muhammad Maaz, who previously held a research fellowship at Anthropic; Erik Wijmans from Apple; and Liliang Ren, who spent two and a half years on Microsoft’s AI Superintelligence team before joining in March.

Why it matters

Thinking Machines Lab is aggressively recruiting talent from Meta while simultaneously securing major infrastructure deals, positioning itself as a significant competitor in the AI startup landscape.