Nvidia’s $2B Synopsys stake strengthens its push into AI-accelerated chip design — partnership to bolster GPU-accelerated EDA tools, but a careful balance is required

Nvidia has taken a $2 billion equity stake in Synopsys, as the two companies announced a long-term collaboration to accelerate electronic design automation workloads on GPUs. Under the partnership, which was announced on December 1, the two companies will co-develop tools intended to shift computationally heavy EDA tasks from CPUs to Nvidia GPUs.

Synopsys already dominates several segments of the chip-design software market, including generative AI for chip development, and its tools are used across the…