Nvidia announced a multi-year expansion of its strategic alliance with chip software maker Synopsys, as well as a $2 billion equity investment into the company.

The non-exclusive deal, meaning both companies can continue partnering with other vendors, aims to move engineering and simulation workloads from CPUs to Nvidia’s GPUs, as well as integrate Nvidia’s AI and computing capabilities into Synopsys’ engineering solutions.

The companies say this shift will help accelerate chip-design workflows across sectors such as semiconductor, automotive, aerospace and industrial, helping R&D teams to design, simulate and verify intelligent products at a faster rate (and at lower cost) than ever before.

"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,” Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s founder, said in a statement on the deal.

Specifically, the deal will give Synopsys access to Nvidia’s CUDA (or Compute Unified Device Architecture), the company’s parallel computing platform and programming model.

Using these systems, Synopsys is set to optimize compute-intensive workloads such as design verification, molecular simulations, and electromagnetic analysis.

In the statement, Huang said this model is “revolutionizing” design and enabling simulation at unprecedented speed and scale.

“From atoms to transistors, from chips to complete systems, [the model is] creating fully functional digital twins inside the computer,” he said.

Another part of the deal focuses on agentic AI. Synopsys will integrate its AgentEngineer technology with Nvidia’s agentic AI stack, including NIM microservices, the NeMo Agent Toolkit, and Nemotron models, to enable autonomous design flows in Synopsys’ systems engineering tools.

Digital twin development is another core pillar of the partnership. Using Nvidia platforms such as Omniverse and Cosmos, the companies say they will aim to deliver advanced virtual design and validation environments for businesses across industries.

In the press release, Synopsys CEO Sassine Ghazi said the companies are poised to deliver the “AI-powered, holistic” design platforms required for next-gen intelligent systems.

"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,” she said. “Together we will re-engineer engineering and empower innovators everywhere to more efficiently realize their innovations."

The partnership builds on recent collaborations between the companies. In May, Synopsys was among the first to adopt Nvidia’s NVLink technology for model training and agentic AI inference, while last year the companies announced their collaboration to accelerate chip manufacturing.

The deal also comes as competition in the semiconductor design sector is heating up.

Nvidia has been at the forefront of the industry and has moved to invest billions in companies to bolster its position. Notable deals include a $5 billion stake in Intel announced in September, and a further $1 billion injection into Nokia.

A planned $100 billion investment into ChatGPT parent company OpenAI was announced earlier this year, but Nvidia’s quarterly financial report suggested that the deal may not yet have been signed off on.

“There is no assurance that we will enter into definitive agreements with respect to the OpenAI opportunity or other potential investments, or that any investment will be completed on expected terms, if at all,” the filing reads. “The timing and magnitude of these and other investments we may make will depend on various factors, including the ability of our partners to successfully develop and deploy AI infrastructure.”