Nvidia is in talks to go from customer to investor in AI data startup Mercor, joining a funding round that would value the company at $20 billion, The Information reports. Existing investor General Catalyst is in talks to lead the round.
Nvidia is already one of Mercor's major customers — it paid the company tens of millions of dollars last quarter for training data used in its open Nemotron models.
Mercor hires programmers, scientists, lawyers, finance professionals, and other experts to use and evaluate AI models, then turns those sessions into post-training data. Nvidia's last two Nemotron models were trained using Mercor data, and a small number of Mercor employees are now effectively dedicated to serving Nvidia. Nvidia isn't betting its data supply on one vendor, though: it also works with Turing, Scale, and its own internal teams.
Even as Nvidia leans heavily on synthetic data, it's still willing to spend tens of millions of dollars in a single quarter on real human expert data. At least when it comes to Nemotron's post-training, that human expertise is a hard cost.