Nvidia takes US$2 billion stake in Synopsys as AI deal spree accelerates

The deal adds to Nvidia’s slew of new partnerships in the artificial intelligence ecosystem

Nvidia has invested US$2 billion in chip design software maker Synopsys as part of an expanded multi-year tie-up to jointly develop new tools for designing products across industries using its AI technology.

The deal, unveiled by the companies on Monday (Dec 1), adds to Nvidia’s slew of new partnerships in the artificial intelligence ecosystem amid concerns of increasingly circular deals.

Synopsys shares rose 7 per cent in premarket trading, while those of Nvidia fell nearly 2 per cent.

The world’s most valuable firm has invested billions of US dollars this year in companies linked to the booming AI industry, ranging from deals allowing as much as a US$100 billion investment in ChatGPT parent OpenAI to a US$5 billion stake in Intel.

Nvidia, which is a Synopsys customer, bought the company’s common stock at US$414.79 per share, the companies said on Monday, representing a discount of about 0.8 per cent to the stock’s last closing price on Friday.

The partnership is not exclusive, the companies said. Synopsys counts AMD as a customer, while Nvidia works with the electronic design automation (Eda) firm’s rival Cadence Design.

Cadence shares were slightly lower in premarket trading.

Under the partnership, Synopsys will use Nvidia’s suite of developer tools and code libraries to work on its applications spanning chip design, physical verification, molecular simulations and other processes involved in EDA.

“The complexity and cost of developing next-generation intelligent systems demands engineering solutions with a deeper integration of electronics and physics, accelerated by AI capabilities and compute,” Synopsys CEO Sassine Ghazi said. REUTERS

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