Nvidia embraces role of AI investor, pushing past $40 billion in equity bets this year

Nvidia stepped on the gas last year, putting cash into companies up and down the AI infrastructure stack and helping to fund businesses that could turn around and buy the chipmaker’s technology. It’s been a lucrative endeavor, as the company’s $5 billion bet on Intel is now worth over $25 billion, a historic return in a matter of months.

In 2026, the pace of deals has kicked into overdrive, with Nvidia already topping $40 billion in commitments and expanding its portfolio to include more public equities.

This week alone Nvidia forged an agreement with data center operator IREN, giving it the right to invest up to $2.1 billion in the company, a day after Nvidia struck a pact with Corning, allowing it to invest up to $3.2 billion in the 175-year-old glass maker. Shares of IREN and Corning popped on the announcements.

Nvidia has been the biggest winner of the artificial intelligence boom, producing the graphics processing units required to train AI models and run large workloads. The global scramble to secure GPUs has lifted Nvidia’s stock by more than 11-fold in four years, propelling the company to a roughly $5.2 trillion market cap and making it the most valuable business in the world.

To help the company grow its dominance beyond chips, Nvidia is financing the entire AI supply chain, ensuring it runs on Nvidia hardware and that there’s sufficient capacity to meet demand. But there’s growing concern in some corners of AI that Nvidia — like cloud providers Google and Amazon — is investing in other companies as a way to fuel its own growth.

Nvidia, which generated $97 billion in free cash flow last fiscal year, is backing some of the very companies that buy its chips and, in some cases, is leasing compute right back to them. Critics have compared it to the vendor financing that helped inflate the dot-com bubble.

Matthew Bryson, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, said in a note that Nvidia’s investments and buildouts fit “squarely into the circular investment theme” that’s been driving fears around the market’s durability. However, Bryson sees the investments as underscoring Nvidia’s vision and creating a “competitive moat” if the company can execute.

An Nvidia spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Nvidia has signed at least seven multibillion-dollar investments this year with publicly traded companies. Additionally, it’s been part of roughly two dozen investment rounds in private companies, including some relatively early-stage deals, according to FactSet.

Its single largest bet was a $30 billion check for ChatGPT creator and longtime partner OpenAI. Nvidia also participated in massive funding rounds for Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI, shortly before it merged with SpaceX in February.

“There are so many great, amazing foundation model companies, and we try to invest in all of them,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said during an April podcast appearance. “We don’t pick winners. We need to support everyone.”

With Nvidia’s earnings report for its fiscal first quarter less than two weeks away, shareholders will get a clearer picture of the size of the company’s expanding portfolio and its impact on financials.

During the last fiscal year, Nvidia invested $17.5 billion in private companies and infrastructure funds, “primarily to support early‑stage startups,” according to its annual filing with the SEC. The company said those investments include AI model companies that purchase its products directly or through cloud service providers.

Non-marketable equity securities (which are private company investments) held on Nvidia’s balance sheet swelled to $22.25 billion at the end of January from $3.39 billion a year earlier. The company reported gains on those assets as well as publicly held equities of $8.92 billion, up from $1.03 billion in the prior fiscal year, in part due its investment in Intel, which has turned into a stock market darling this year, up well over 200%.

On Nvidia’s last earnings call in February, Huang said, “Our investments are focused very squarely, strategically on expanding and deepening our ecosystem reach.”

The IREN deal this week includes an agreement that the data center company will deploy up to 5 gigawatts of Nvidia’s DSX-branded infrastructure designs intended to power AI workloads at facilities across the globe.

As part of the Corning deal, the glass company is building three new U.S. facilities dedicated to optical technologies for Nvidia, which will likely be turning to fiber-optic cables instead of copper as it builds out its rack-scale systems.

In March, Nvidia invested $2 billion in Marvell Technology as part of a strategic partnership to work on silicon photonics technology. That month it put the same amount in Lumentum and Coherent, two companies developing photonics technologies.

Then there are the so-called neoclouds. In January, Nvidia invested $2 billion in CoreWeave in a deal that involves building out data centers with Nvidia’s technology. It also invested $2 billion in Nebius Group, an AI cloud company, as part of an agreement on AI infrastructure deployment, fleet management, inference and AI factory design.

Chip analyst Jordan Klein at Mizuho called the deals with component makers “super smart by the CFO and team and a great use of cash,” because they help accelerate the development of critical technology and products that are in short supply. He’s more skeptical of the neocloud investments, which he said “feel more questionable to me and likely investors.”

“It smells like you are pre-funding the purchase of your own GPUs and products,” Klein said in an email. Still, he noted that the cloud providers have critical attributes like power and data center capacity that Nvidia needs.

Ben Bajarin at Creative Strategies shared a similar sentiment regarding IREN, telling CNBC, “The risk is that if the cycle turns, the market starts questioning how much of the demand was organic versus supported by Nvidia’s own balance sheet.”

As much as Nvidia is funneling money into publicly traded partners, those wagers are dwarfed by the chipmaker’s investment in OpenAI.

The $30 billion Nvidia pumped into OpenAI in late February came more than a decade after the companies started working together, though they’ve grown increasingly intertwined since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, the moment that sparked the generative AI frenzy.

Nvidia’s investment in OpenAI was originally going to be much bigger. In September, the companies said Nvidia would be putting in up to $100 billion over time into OpenAI as the AI company deployed 10 gigawatt’s of Nvidia’s systems. That deal never got off the ground as OpenAI pivoted away from developing data centers, instead leaning heavily on partners like Oracle, Microsoft and Amazon to piece together as much capacity as possible.

Huang said in March that investing $100 billion in OpenAI is probably “not in the cards,” and that the $30 billion deal “might be the last time” it writes a check before an IPO that could take place this year.

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