NVIDIA's Venture Arm Asks Court to Block Label Testimony Demand in Suno Case
NVentures, the venture capital arm of chip maker NVIDIA, has asked a federal court to stop Universal Music Group (UMG) and Sony Music Entertainment from forcing it to give testimony in their copyright lawsuit against the AI music company Suno.
The motion was filed on Tuesday, 10 November, in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, according to Music Business Worldwide. NVentures asks the court either to cancel the labels' testimony demand outright or to limit the scope of the questions. Suno is a service that generates songs from text prompts.
NVentures describes itself as a passive minority investor. It says it took part in Suno's Series C funding round in November 2025, which closed more than a year after the labels' action began. A minority investor holds a stake but not control of the company. NVentures says it holds no board seat, observer role or advisory position at Suno.
The company also says it did not select, acquire, supply or use Suno's training data, did not develop Suno's models and does not operate its service. It says it has already handed the labels 6,324 documents, totalling 28,194 pages.
The labels' case dates to June 2024, when UMG, Capitol Records and Sony sued Suno. They allege that Suno copied their recordings to train its models, which are the software systems that learn patterns from examples and then produce new output. Warner Music Group was an original co-plaintiff, but it settled with Suno in November 2025 and agreed to a licensing deal.
In August, UMG and Sony were cleared to add a further claim. It alleges that Suno obtained recordings by stream-ripping them from YouTube, meaning they were copied from the video platform using a downloading tool. The labels say Suno got around YouTube's anti-download protections, and they seek up to $2,500 for each alleged bypass.
The original lawsuit covers 560 recordings. US law allows statutory damages, which are fixed sums set per work rather than based on proven losses. For willful infringement, those sums can reach $150,000 per recording. Across 560 recordings, that works out to a theoretical exposure of $84 million. That is a ceiling set by the statute, not an amount any court has awarded.
On 18 September, UMG and Sony filed a second lawsuit against Suno covering a further 60,202 recordings. On the same basis, the theoretical exposure there tops $9 billion. Again, that is the maximum the law allows, and the case has not produced a finding on it.
For musicians and songwriters, the question at the heart of these cases is whether their recordings can be used to train AI systems without permission, and what they are owed if they can't. The motion is a request, not a ruling. The court will decide whether the labels can question NVentures, and how far.
