Nvidia isn’t just buying data from Mercor anymore — it’s discussing buying a piece of the company, and that shift from customer to owner is the real story. Mercor’s valuation would double to $20 billion from its $10 billion October mark, according to The Information’s August 19, 2026 report, with existing backer General Catalyst leading the round and Nvidia’s own contribution size still unknown.
A $20 billion mark on a company still logging class-action suits over a contractor data breach isn’t a valuation — it’s a bet on Nvidia’s checkbook.
The mechanics here matter for the whole data-labeling market. Mercor’s annualized gross revenue hit $2 billion in June, doubling from earlier this year, and Nvidia alone paid it tens of millions of dollars last quarter for expert-curated legal, financial and scientific data feeding its open-source Nemotron models — with a dedicated Mercor team now working almost exclusively on Nvidia’s account. That’s the same vertical-integration playbook Nvidia ran on Scale AI, which it backed at a $14 billion valuation in 2024, and it puts pressure on rivals like Turing and Surge AI to either land their own chip-industry sugar daddy or get squeezed on margin.
The tension for Mercor is that its biggest closed-source clients — OpenAI, Google, Anthropic — are Nemotron’s direct competitors, and taking Nvidia money makes Mercor’s neutrality a harder sell even as its revenue keeps compounding. Watch whether the round closes at $20 billion or gets marked down amid the ongoing breach litigation, and whether Scale AI or Turing answer with financing news of their own.
At Mercor, our vast talent network trains frontier AI models in the same way teachers train students: by sharing knowledge, experience and context that can't be captured in code alone. Each project expands what models understand.
