According to three people familiar with the matter, NVIDIA (NVDA) plans to invest in d-Matrix. This seven-year-old company develops AI server chips and is itself a competitor of NVIDIA.

The proposed investment is one of NVIDIA's moves to promote compatibility between its own technology and rival chip designers, bringing them into its own dominant hardware ecosystem, even though NVIDIA has recently expanded its market share against nearly all rivals.

This is also NVIDIA's first investment in an AI inference chip startup since it reached a $20 billion licensing agreement with Groq last December, indicating that NVIDIA will not bet on just one such company.

Three months ago, NVIDIA said it was working with d-Matrix to make the two companies' chips work together, handling different parts of the same AI inference task in order to improve the efficiency of this type of computing.