Key Notes
- Nvidia has discussed investing in Mercor, a data-labeling startup that supplies expert-curated training data for Nvidia's open-source Nemotron models.
- The round would value Mercor at $20 billion, doubling its $10 billion October valuation. Mercor's client base still skews toward closed-model labs including OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic. .
Nvidia has discussed investing in Mercor, a data-labeling startup that supplies human-expert training data for Nvidia’s open-source Nemotron models, The Information reported, citing a person familiar with the process. The potential investment would be part of a funding round valuing the three-year-old company at roughly $20 billion, double its $10 billion valuation from an October round in which it raised $350 million.
Existing investor General Catalyst is in talks to lead the new round. The total size of the financing and the specific amount Nvidia might invest could not be determined, and neither company responded to requests for comment.
Mercor’s business model centers on hiring subject-matter experts, lawyers, financial professionals and scientists, who manually prepare high-quality datasets used to train AI models. Nvidia paid Mercor tens of millions of dollars last quarter for data curated across legal, financial and scientific domains, which the company says was incorporated into its two most recent Nemotron releases. A dedicated group of Mercor employees now works almost entirely on the Nvidia account to keep pace with demand.
That relationship has grown quickly. Mercor’s annualized gross revenue reached $2 billion in June, more than doubling since the start of the year, after the company generated $614 million in gross revenue in the first half of 2026. Despite the growth in Nvidia’s business, Mercor’s revenue has historically leaned on closed frontier labs, with OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic among its major clients, while Nvidia relies heavily on AI-generated synthetic data for Nemotron alongside expert-labeled data from Mercor and rivals Turing and Scale AI.
Mercor has also faced legal scrutiny. It was served with at least seven class-action lawsuits after an April data breach that plaintiffs allege exposed contractor information, including job interview recordings, facial biometric data and computer screenshots. Mercor has disputed the claims and said it looks forward to presenting the facts.
The Compounding Problem
The talks illustrate a broader shift in how Nvidia deploys its enormous cash generation. Rather than only selling chips, the company is increasingly taking equity positions across the AI stack, having invested $18.6 billion in private companies and infrastructure funds in the quarter ending in April alone, more than it invested in all of the prior year. That mirrors Nvidia’s 2024 investment in Scale AI, another data-labeling firm, at a $14 billion valuation.
For Nvidia, an investment in Mercor would deepen a strategic dependency: as it pushes its open-weight Nemotron models to compete with closed offerings from labs like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, high-quality expert-labeled data has become a genuine input constraint, not just a vendor relationship. Backing Mercor directly could secure priority access to that data and align the startup’s incentives with Nvidia’s model roadmap, the same logic behind chip makers and cloud providers increasingly investing in their own customers and suppliers throughout the AI value chain.
The move also comes as Nvidia works to mobilize capital more broadly, having announced on August 10 a partnership with six financial institutions to establish compute-financing platforms aimed at unlocking more than $500 billion in third-party capital for AI infrastructure buildouts. Together, the moves point to a company using its scale not just to sell hardware but to shape the surrounding AI ecosystem, from the data that trains models to the financing that builds the data centers running them.
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