This article first appeared on GuruFocus .
NVIDIA Corporation ( NASDAQ:NVDA ) is quietly leaning further into the AI inference trade, backing startup Basetenin its latest funding round, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.
The round pulled in $300 million and pushed Baseten's valuation north of $5 billion, more than double where it was before. The raise was led by IVPand CapitalG, with Nvidia joining as a strategic investor. That comes just a few months after Baseten raised $150 million in September, showing how quickly money is flowing into the inference side of AI.
Baseten focuses on running AI models efficiently once they're trained, which is becoming a bigger deal as AI moves from demos into real products. CEO Tuhin Srivastava said the platform is already powering applications used by hundreds of millions of people, letting teams focus on their products instead of worrying about performance or reliability.
The company has also been lining up partnerships. Nebiusrecently teamed up with Baseten to offer text to video inference across cloud regions in the U.S., Finland, and France. Baseten also supports Nvidia's Nemotron 3 Nano model, tightening its links to Nvidia's broader AI stack.
Nvidia's involvement is another signal that inference is where the next bottlenecks and profits may sit. Training gets the headlines, but as AI usage scales, running models cheaply and reliably is becoming just as important. Nvidia clearly wants a hand in that layer too.
