NVIDIA Corp. on Monday said it has invested $2 billion in chip design software giant Synopsys Inc. in an expanded multiyear partnership to develop artificial intelligence (AI)-powered engineering tools across multiple industries.
The deal marks the world’s most valuable company’s latest move to deepen its footprint in the AI ecosystem, though it also has raised questions about increasingly interconnected business relationships within the industry.
Synopsys shares jumped as much as 7% following the announcement. NVIDIA’s stock showed mixed movement — it dropped nearly 2% in premarket trading before recovering to rise 1% during regular trading hours.
Under the partnership, Synopsys will tap into NVIDIA’s suite of developer tools and code libraries to turbocharge its applications across chip design, physical verification, molecular simulations, and other electronic design automation (EDA) processes. The collaboration is intended to help Synopsys reduce compute-intensive workloads that previously required weeks down to hours.
“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 in a statement announcing the investment.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang emphasized the transformative nature of the partnership during a Monday appearance on CNBC. “This is a huge deal,” Huang said. “The partnership we’re announcing today is about revolutionizing one of the most compute-intensive industries in the world: design and engineering.”
Huang highlighted the broader industry shift occurring in computing technology. “We’re going through a platform shift from classical, general-purpose computing running on CPUs to a new way of doing computing, accelerated computing running on GPUs,” he said.
The partnership builds on an existing relationship between the two companies. Huang noted that NVIDIA was “built on a foundation of design tools from Synopsys,” acknowledging the chip designer’s long-standing reliance on Synopsys software.
Importantly, both companies confirmed the partnership is not exclusive. Synopsys maintains AMD Inc. as a customer, while NVIDIA continues working with Cadence Design Systems Inc., a rival EDA firm.
“NVIDIA’s investment in Synopsys tightens the connection between AI compute and the tools that design modern silicon. Bringing NVIDIA GPU-powered AI and simulation directly into Synopsys’ EDA workflows is a practical move to shorten design cycles and raise the ceiling on what teams can model and verify,” said Mitch Ashley, vice president/practice lead, DevOps and AppDev, at The Futurum Group.
“More broadly, NVIDIA’s investment is where engineering is heading. AI-assisted planning, simulation, and digital twins will shape how next-generation chips and complex systems are built,” Ashley said. “NVIDIA and Synopsys are aligning the compute and the design stack to make that shift real.”
The investment adds to NVIDIA’s aggressive spending spree this year, which includes potential investments of up to $100 billion in OpenAI and a $5 billion stake in Intel Corp.
