Nvidia Negotiates $20B Investment in Mercor to Secure AI Data Startup With $2B Revenue

The chip designer paid Mercor tens of millions of dollars last quarter to develop its Nemotron open source models and now has several of the startup's specialists focused almost entirely on its projects. General Catalyst is in talks to lead a funding round that would value the AI data labeler at $20 billion, with Nvidia pursuing a participating investment to secure high-quality training data for complex tasks. The investment would further tie Nvidia to a provider that hires experts in science, law, and finance to evaluate AI performance.

Mercor's annualized gross revenue reached $2 billion in June, doubling its level from the start of the year. The company provides training data to other leading AI developers, including Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. The specific size of the investment proposed by Nvidia has not been disclosed.