Nvidia to invest $3 bln in Meta as companies expand AI agent partnership
Nvidia’s investment in Meta is another example of the chipmaker’s growing role as a banker to the AI boom, the Wall Street Journal writes / Photo: Algi Febri Sugita / Shutterstock
Nvidia announced that it will invest $3 billion in Meta’s equity offering after the social media and AI giant unveiled plans to raise up to $95 billion to fund investment in AI infrastructure. Meta had stated the previous day that Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices, and Broadcom had expressed interest in buying up to $5 billion of the Facebook parent’s stock. Nvidia and Meta also announced an expanded partnership on AI agents.
Details
Alongside the investment, Nvidia announced that Mark Zuckerberg’s company will expand its deployment of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform and Vera CPUs. The two companies will also deepen their partnership on Muse, Meta’s AI agent, which launched last month.
“AI agents represent a new computing paradigm – software that understands our goals, reasons, uses tools and gets work done on our behalf,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said of the agreement. “This changes how we use computers, from operating applications to working with intelligent agents.” Zuckerberg, for his part, said: “We’re excited to keep working with NVIDIA to deliver the best personal agents and frontier models for billions of people.”
Nvidia and Meta may also expand their collaboration on Nvidia’s OpenShell software, which allows developers to manually restrict certain agent capabilities. This could include using it to deploy software safely and using the Sentry tool to monitor AI agents’ behavior, Reuters adds.
Nvidia shares had risen 0.67% in premarket trading on Tuesday as of this writing, while Meta was off 0.17%.
Context
On Monday, Meta announced plans to raise up to $95 billion through sales of common and preferred stock. The proceeds are intended to fund its AI development efforts. Nvidia, meanwhile, has been rapidly building stakes in companies powering the AI boom, CNBC notes. Its investment in Meta is another example of how the world’s most valuable company, with a market capitalization of more than $5.2 trillion, has become a banker to the AI boom, the Wall Street Journal writes.
Nvidia often invests in companies that buy its chips or uses its balance sheet to backstop financing for those customers. The chipmaker has invested in OpenAI, Anthropic, Intel, and xAI, among others. According to Dealroom data, Nvidia has participated in 121 funding rounds so far this year, versus just 13 in 2022.
