Nvidia Weighs Investment in Round Valuing Mercor at $20 Billion

Nvidia has discussed participating in a funding round that would value Mercor, a data labeling provider that supplies data that helps the chip designer develop open-source models, at $20 billion, The Information reported Wednesday (Aug. 19), citing unnamed sources.

The size of Nvidia’s potential investment and the total funding round could not be learned, according to the report.

Mercor’s revenue from Nvidia has been growing as the chip company focuses on the development of its Nemotron open-source models, and the company earned tens of millions of dollars from Nvidia during the last quarter, per the report.

Neither Nvidia nor Mercor immediately replied to PYMNTS’ request for comment.

Nvidia also uses data from Turing and Scale, and the company invested in Scale’s 2024 funding round that valued the company at $14 billion, the report said.

Mercor was valued at $10 billion in an October Series C funding round in which the company raised $350 million. That valuation was five times higher than the company’s Series B valuation, Mercor Co-Founder and CEO Brendan Foody said in a blog post.

“At Mercor, our vast talent network trains frontier AI models in the same way teachers train students: by sharing knowledge, experience and context that can’t be captured in code alone,” Foody said in the post. “Each project expands what models understand.”

It was reported in April that Mercor had been served with at least seven class-action lawsuits in the wake of a data breach. The suits allege the breach exposed Mercor contractor information that included job interview recordings, facial biometric data and screenshots of employees’ computers.

Mercor told the Wall Street Journal at the time: “We strongly dispute the speculative claims in these lawsuits and look forward to presenting the facts at the appropriate time and place.”

Nvidia announced Aug. 10 that it partnered with six financial institutions to establish independent compute platforms designed to mobilize over $500 billion of third-party capital for the buildout of AI infrastructure.

The compute financing platforms will be established at a global scale, and the partnerships will see Nvidia work with the firms to create dedicated pools of capital at scale at attractive rates for Nvidia customers, the company said.