Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, an existing backer of the AI enterprise Thinking Machines Lab helmed by former OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, has informed other potential investors that the startup is in discussions to secure a new funding round.

The planned capital raise is expected to total between $5 billion and $6 billion, positioning the company with a pre-money valuation of at least $40 billion.

According to the investment firm, which holds a board seat at Thinking Machines Lab, chipmaker NVIDIA is anticipated to contribute roughly half of that sum, approximately $2.5 billion.

This move would extend NVIDIA's ongoing strategy to strengthen its foothold within the open-source AI developer community, following its previous $12.9 billion acquisition of open-source model provider Hugging Face.

It remains unclear whether this new capital injection is the same commitment that the chipmaker referenced in March, when it announced plans to make a "substantial" yet undisclosed investment into Thinking Machines Lab.

At that time, NVIDIA stated its intention to forge a "long-term, gigawatt-scale strategic partnership" with the startup, a development widely interpreted as a move to secure access to NVIDIA's highly sought-after AI server chips.