AI Audio Startup ElevenLabs Expands Nvidia Collaboration Amid CEO Jensen Huang’s Affair Scandal

ElevenLabs is keeping its yearslong Nvidia partnership strong, no matter the national-security chaos enveloping the chipmaker’s CEO.

The AI audio startup said on Wednesday during its New York Summit it would expand its partnership with Nvidia to power its suite of voice agents, dubbed ElevenAgents, with the tech provider’s Nemotron 3.5 Super VL, its latest open model that helps power AI agents’ understanding of workflows and human reasoning. Some of the expanded features for the agents unveiled on Wednesday include memory features, routines and helping users architect new agents.

The company is also employing Nvidia’s Vera Rubin architecture to provide the compute required for the deployment of its AI agents, capacity the company said would help support large-scale demands from businesses. Some of those demands include powering the voice agents used for Centralna e-Rejestracja, the appointment-making platform within Poland’s national online health system, and the companies said they wanted to make more voice agents available to governments worldwide with Nvidia’s AI architecture. The two are also trying to bring such agents to robots.

The expanded collaboration, CEO Mati Staniszewski said in a statement, was necessary as “voice agents become critical infrastructure.”

“By combining our audio models and agents, with Nvidia’s LLMs, accelerated computing and security stack, we’re giving enterprises and governments the platform they need to deploy voice agents at massive scale,” Staniszewski said. “Nvidia has been a superb partner to us, and we’re excited to keep building together.”

The two companies have been partners since 2022, with ElevenLabs using Nvidia’s GPUs to power its first text-to-speech model and Nvidia using ElevenLabs to create voiceovers for videos at company events. Nvidia last year became an ElevenLabs investor, complete with a splashy produced video posted to Staniszewski’s LinkedIn page. ElevenLabs completed a $300 million employee tender offer in September that valued the company at $22 billion, doubling the $11 billion valuation it reached in February after a funding round.

But the expansion comes as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has become enveloped in a national-security scandal over his affair with a Chinese tech executive allegedly recruited by China to spy on Huang and learn more about the company’s AI technology. Huang is currently under investigation by Nvidia’s board of directors and the FBI, though he will continue leading the company throughout the inquiries.

“For decades we adapted to computers — keyboards, screens, menus. Now computers are learning to speak our language,” Huang said in a statement about the ElevenLabs partnership. “With Nvidia Nemotron reasoning inside ElevenAgents and Nvidia accelerated computing powering large-scale deployments, enterprises and governments can run voice agents securely at national scale — and make talking the fastest way to get things done.”