Nvidia buys $2bn worth of Synopsys in "huge deal"

Nvidia has bought $2 billion worth of Synopsys stock as part of a deal designed to foster tighter collaboration between the chipmaker and the chip-design software company.

The multi-year partnership covers everything from Nvidia CUDA accelerated computing — Compute Unified Device Architecture, a platform for using GPUs for a wider range of tasks — as well as agentic and physical robots and Nvidia's multiverse digital twin system known as Omniverse.

The aim is to increase the use of GPU-accelerated engineering solutions, with the two companies teaming up on engineering and marketing.

"This is a huge deal," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC. "The partnership we're announcing today is about revolutionizing one of the most compute-intensive industries in the world: design and engineering."

At the press conference announcing the deal, Huang said that using Nvidia's frameworks to shift CPU work to GPUs had accelerated development work. "Something that would take weeks could now happen in hours," he reportedly said.

That was echoed by Synopsys CEO Sassine Ghazi, who said his company has seen a "significant speedup" after shifting to Nvidia GPUs using CUDA several years ago, saying this new partnership will reduce workloads from taking weeks to mere hours.

Accelerating the shift

Huang said the deal highlighted the shift from CPUs to GPUs, the style of chip Nvidia dominates.

"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," Huang told CNBC. "That old way of doing is going to continue to… exist, of course, but the world is shifting to this new way of doing computing."

The partnership will help accelerate Synopsis applications by using Nvidia CUDA-X libraries and AI physics technologies to boost everything from chip design to molecular simulations. The two companies will combine their agentic AI technologies — Synopsys AgentEngineer and NVIDIA Agentic AI technology stack — to create autonomous design and simulation.

The partnership aims to create products and services to help reach engineers across different industries with both on-premise and cloud-based tools.

Huang added: "Our partnership with Synopsys harnesses the power of NVIDIA accelerated computing and AI to reimagine engineering and design — empowering engineers to invent the extraordinary products that will shape our future."

Digital twins

The two companies will also collaborate on digital twins for virtual design and testing for industries such as semiconductors, robotics, healthcare, and more.

In a statement, Huang said that GPU-boosted design is changing what's possible when it comes to simulations and digital twins. One of the products offered by Nvidia is Omniverse, which enables the creation of massive digital twins of factories and other industrial spaces.

"CUDA GPU-accelerated computing is revolutionizing design — enabling simulation at unprecedented speed and scale, from atoms to transistors, from chips to complete systems, creating fully functional digital twins inside the computer," said Huang.

Tighter teamwork

The deal is an extension of an existing partnership between the two companies, but Sassine Ghazi, president and CEO of Synopsys, said tighter integration was needed to drive this transformation.

"The complexity and cost of developing next-generation intelligent systems demand engineering solutions with a deeper integration of electronics and physics, accelerated by AI capabilities and compute," Ghazi said in a statement.

"No two companies are better positioned to deliver AI-powered, holistic system design solutions than Synopsys and NVIDIA," he added. "Together we will re-engineer engineering and empower innovators everywhere to more efficiently realize their innovations."

The news of the deal sent Synopsys stock up 4.9%, while Nvidia climbed 1.65%, though its share price has been dampened by suggestions that Google could take the lead in AI chips from the GPU maker, after Meta was spotted shopping for Google AI chips. Nvidia and Synopsys both said the deal was not exclusive, leaving the door to partnerships with rival companies, too.