Nvidia invests $2 billion stake in Synopsys for advanced chip design tools and simulation capabilities.

As part of its effort to spread GPUs everywhere, Nvidia is investing $2 billion into simulation giant Synopsys. The investment will see the GPU kingmaker purchase $2 billion of Synopsys common stock at a price of $414.79 a share, representing the latest development in a years-long relationship between the two companies. While Nvidia's GPUs have become synonymous with AI in recent years, they have been deployed across numerous workloads far beyond machine learning, from semiconductor manufacturing and physics simulations to electronic design automation. According to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during a press conference on Monday, "Something that would take weeks could now happen in hours."

Synopsys has been one of the most enthusiastic adopters of Nvidia's technology. At GTC this spring, the company touted up to a 30x speedup for circuit simulations running in its PrimeSIM suite and up to a 20x speedup across its Proteus computational lithography suite using Nvidia's latest generation of Blackwell accelerators. Synopsys also utilizes Nvidia's NeMo frameworks and NIMs—containerized models containing everything necessary to run them at scale—to power its AI knowledge assistant. According to Synopsys CEO Sassine Ghazi, "We started redesigning some of our products about 7 years ago on Nvidia GPUs using the CUDA layer and in a number of cases, we've seen a significant speedup." As part of today's deal, the duo has committed to expanding support for Nvidia hardware and CUDA-X libraries to a broader range of applications and services, including developing digital twins for industries like semiconductor design and manufacturing, robotics, aerospace, automotive, and energy.

This investment follows a pattern of Nvidia backing its largest customers. In September, Nvidia announced up to a $100 billion tie-up with OpenAI contingent on the deployment of 10 gigawatts worth of Nvidia hardware. Last month, Nvidia and Microsoft announced a similar arrangement with OpenAI rival Anthropic, under which Anthropic agreed to purchase $30 billion worth of Azure compute built on Nvidia hardware and services in exchange for up to $15 billion in investments—up to $10 billion from Nvidia and up to $5 billion from Microsoft. However, the Nvidia-Synopsys deal differs in that it is not tied to customer milestones or exclusivity. As Ghazi told analysts, "If an AMD or an Intel or whichever customer is wanting to capture a similar opportunity, it's not exclusive."

Nevertheless, all of these deals effectively serve to incentivize Nvidia customers to field larger quantities of GPUs. The broader competitive landscape reflects this dynamic, with AMD similarly dangling roughly 10 percent of its stock in front of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, contingent on leveraging his datacenter relationships to spin up 6 gigawatts worth of Instinct accelerators.