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

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, comes as Nvidia has carried out a range of investments, such as those in OpenAI and Anthropic, to try to cement its dominance in the artificial intelligence market.

The Synopsys deal is about shifting the work of several hi-tech industries that are just starting to adopt AI away from central processing units used in the past and towards the graphics processing unit chips sold by Nvidia.

Synopsys software is widely used in designing everything from computer chips to jet engines. Engineers use its tools to simulate those designs virtually in computers before committing to expensive prototype manufacturing.

Those simulations can take weeks but could be sped up to a few hours using Nvidia’s chips, the CEOs of the two companies said during a press conference.

“The order of magnitude speed-up is going to unlock opportunities that have never been possible before,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in announcing the deal.