NVIDIA's NVentures asks a court to block Universal and Sony's Suno subpoena, saying it already handed over 6,324 documents

NVIDIA’s venture arm doesn’t want to sit for a deposition in the Suno lawsuit. On November 10, 2026, NVentures filed a motion to quash Universal and Sony’s subpoena in San Francisco federal court, calling itself a “passive minority investor” that has already handed over its files.

The labels want an NVentures witness to answer questions under oath about Suno’s training data, its market and the legal risks it discussed with its backers. NVentures says the labels should ask Suno.

NVentures is the third Suno investor pulled into the labels’ subpoena push this fall. So what exactly do Universal and Sony want from it?

What Universal and Sony want NVentures to testify about in the Suno case

The subpoena is dated August 17, 2026 and set the deposition for September 29, the day before fact discovery was then scheduled to close. It listed 13 topics running from January 1, 2022 to today.

After 2 rounds of talks, the labels dropped 2 topics and agreed to take a written certificate in place of testimony on a third, the one about authenticating NVentures’ documents. That leaves 10. They cover:

• NVentures’ business dealings with Suno before it invested.
• The investment materials Suno supplied for the November 2025 round.
• Suno’s training data and NVentures’ own due diligence.
• Any existing NVentures analyses of Suno’s licensing costs and its growth.
• What NVentures knows about the market for Suno’s service and Suno’s effect on the music industry.
• Amended Topic 12: “Your communications with Suno concerning the risk of litigation related to Suno’s training data.”

Time is short. On October 30, the Boston court hearing UMG Recordings v. Suno extended the deadline for already-noticed third-party depositions to November 20, 2026, the motion says.

The labels’ responses to NVentures’ motion are due November 24, according to Music Business Worldwide.

NVIDIA Corporation, NVentures’ parent company, filed its own motion the same day to quash a separate deposition subpoena, MBW reports from the docket. The law firm Keker, Van Nest & Peters represents both.

Why NVentures says a passive minority investor shouldn’t testify about Suno

NVentures’ first argument is about who holds the facts. It says it never picked, bought or used Suno’s training data, never built Suno’s models and never ran the service. Its only role was writing a check in a round that closed more than a year after the labels sued.

It also says the labels never pointed to a gap in the 6,324 documents, or to a single question those files and Suno can’t answer.

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Considered together, these demands would turn a passive minority investor into a source of testimony about the defendant's conduct and the economics of an entire industry.

The second argument is about experts. Topics 8, 9 and 11 ask about the economics of licensing, Suno’s effect on the music industry and the market for Suno’s outputs, and NVentures calls those unretained expert opinions that a court can block under Rule 45.

Plaintiffs in other AI cases, it notes, got their market-harm opinions from paid experts, citing the OpenAI copyright litigation and Bartz v. Anthropic.

Then there’s the Udio ruling both sides like. In September 2025, Magistrate Judge Kandis A. Westmore ordered a16z, Udio’s lead investor, to hand its files to the labels, and the labels leaned on that order against Lightspeed.

NVentures quotes the same ruling for its limits. Westmore stressed that a16z had a partner on Udio’s board and another as an observer: “In short, this is not a case where a16z was a mere passive investor, whose only role was deciding whether or not to invest in Udio,” she wrote, as MBW reported.

NVentures says that’s exactly what it is.

How NVentures fits the labels’ fight with Suno’s investors

Suno has raised money from a long list of funds, most recently in a $400 million-plus Series D in June 2026, and the labels want to know what Suno told them. In the Lightspeed fight, the labels said investor files are some of the best evidence on fair use, because they show the market Suno was chasing and the risks it knew about.

Lightspeed led Suno’s Series B, sits on its board and moved to quash its subpoena in September. Menlo Ventures led the Series C, and on October 26 a judge let the labels depose its ex-principal C.C. Gong over a deleted post saying she had moved most of her listening to Suno.

NVentures joined that same Series C, a $250 million round at a $2.45 billion valuation, alongside Hallwood Media, Lightspeed and Matrix. It made no other investment in Suno, according to its motion. Apple is fighting a subpoena in the same case, too, though that one came from Suno.

There’s an awkward side to this one for Universal. In January, UMG announced an AI collaboration with NVIDIA built around its Music Flamingo model, and NVIDIA’s own music AI is already in court in Jamendo’s training-data lawsuit. Now UMG wants NVIDIA’s fund to explain what it learned about Suno’s training data.

If the labels win this one, even a minority fund with no board seat can be made to testify about what Suno told it. I log each step on the Suno lawsuit tracker.