NVIDIA is no longer just Meta's supplier. It's now a shareholder, too. The chipmaker announced Tuesday that it will invest $3 billion in Meta's equity offering as the two companies expand their partnership around Muse, Meta's AI assistant, according to the joint announcement.

The deal closes a loop that defines the current AI economy. Meta is raising money to buy compute; NVIDIA sells the compute — and now it's handing some of the money back. Meta upsized its equity offering to $97.5 billion earlier in the day, the largest fundraising in its history, after announcing plans Monday to raise up to $95 billion to bankroll its AI infrastructure buildout, according to Dow Jones. NVIDIA's $3 billion buys it a seat at a table it was already setting.

The technical side of the deal is straightforward: Meta will expand its deployment of NVIDIA's Vera Rubin systems and Vera CPUs, plus Spectrum-X Ethernet networking and BlueField-4, to run next-generation AI agents. The two companies are also considering working together on NVIDIA's OpenShell reference architecture for safe agent deployment and NVIDIA Sentry for monitoring how agents behave.

"AI agents represent a new computing paradigm — software that understands our goals, reasons, uses tools and gets work done on our behalf," said Jensen Huang, NVIDIA's founder and CEO. "This changes how we use computers, from operating applications to working with intelligent agents."

The bet is really on Muse. Launched in September, the assistant sits at the center of Mark Zuckerberg's "personal superintelligence" pitch — an agent that can reach into your email, calendar, payments, health, shopping, and smart-home apps, with access users can revoke at any time. Meta says Muse's models have delivered frontier-level benchmark performance and surging downloads since launch, and the two companies will now tune the Muse family of models directly against NVIDIA hardware.

"Muse is how we bring personal superintelligence to everyone. We're excited to keep working with NVIDIA to deliver the best personal agents and frontier models for billions of people," Zuckerberg said.

Watch next: whether other chipmakers follow NVIDIA's lead. If agents become the biggest new source of compute demand, owning a piece of the companies building them is a cheaper way to lock in that demand than competing on price — and $3 billion is a rounding error on NVIDIA's balance sheet for a front-row seat to Meta's $97.5 billion spending spree.

— via GlobeNewswire