Nvidia embraces AI investor, topping $40 billion in equity bets 2026

Nvidia He stepped on the gas last year, pouring cash into companies up and down the AI ​​infrastructure stack and helping finance businesses that could turn around and buy the chip maker’s technology. It was a lucrative endeavor because of the company’s $5 billion bet. Intel It is now worth over $25 billion, a historic return in just a few months.

In 2026, the pace of deals has gone into overdrive, with Nvidia already surpassing $40 billion in commitments and expanding its portfolio to include more publicly traded stocks.

Just this week Nvidia signed a deal with data center operator IRENOne day after making deal with Nvidia, giving the company the right to invest up to $2.1 billion CorningIt allows the 175-year-old glass manufacturer to invest up to $3.2 billion. Shares of IREN and Corning soared upon the announcements.

Nvidia has been the biggest winner of the AI ​​boom, producing the graphics processing units needed to train AI models and run large workloads. The global scramble to secure GPUs has sent Nvidia’s shares soaring more than 11-fold in four years, pushing the company to a market cap of nearly $5.2 trillion and making it the most valuable company in the world.

To help the company expand its dominance beyond chips, Nvidia is funding its entire AI supply chain, ensuring the system runs on Nvidia hardware and has enough capacity to meet demand. But there is growing concern in some corners of AI that Nvidia is becoming like cloud providers. Google And Amazon – invests in other companies as a way to accelerate its own growth.

Nvidia, which generated $97 billion in free cash flow last fiscal year, supports some of the companies that buy its chips and, in some cases, leases its computers directly back to them. Critics compared it to the seller financing that helped inflate the dot-com bubble.

Matthew Bryson, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, said in a note that Nvidia’s investments and restructurings “fit neatly into the cyclical investment theme” that has raised fears about the market’s resilience. But Bryson thinks the investments underscore Nvidia’s vision and will create a “competitive moat” if the company achieves it.

An Nvidia spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Nvidia has invested at least seven billion dollars with publicly traded companies this year. It was also part of nearly two dozen investment rounds in private companies, including some relatively early-stage deals, according to FactSet.

His biggest single bet was: $30 billion check to ChatGPT creator and long-time partner OpenAI. Nvidia also participated in major funding rounds for Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI shortly before its merger with SpaceX in February.

during last financial year, Nvidia has invested $17.5 billion in private companies and infrastructure funds “primarily to support early-stage startups.” annual filing with the SEC. The company said these investments include AI model companies that purchase their products directly or through cloud service providers.

Nonmarketable shares (private company investments) held on Nvidia’s balance sheet rose to $22.25 billion at the end of January, from $3.39 billion a year earlier. The company reported gains of $8.92 billion on those assets and publicly traded shares, up from $1.03 billion in the previous fiscal year, due in part to a more than 200% increase in its investment in Intel, which has become a stock market darling this year.

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

This week’s IREN agreement includes an agreement that the data center company will deploy up to 5 gigawatts of Nvidia’s DSX-branded infrastructure designs aimed at powering AI workloads at facilities around the world.

As part of the Corning deal, the glass company is building three new U.S. facilities dedicated to optical technologies for Nvidia; This facility will likely turn to fiber optic cables instead of copper when building its rack-scale systems.

Nvidia invested $2 billion in March Marvel Technology as part of a strategic partnership to work on silicon photonics technology. He put in the same amount that month Lumentum And ConsistentTwo companies developing photonic technologies.

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

Chip analyst Jordan Klein of Mizuho called the deals with component makers “extremely smart and an excellent use of cash by the CFO and team” because they help accelerate the development of critical technologies and products that are in short supply. He’s more skeptical of Neocloud investments, saying it “sounds more suspicious to me and probably to investors.”

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

Ben Bajarin of Creative Strategies shared a similar sentiment regarding IREN, telling CNBC: “If the cycle reverses, the market starts to question how much of the demand is organic versus how much of it is supported by Nvidia’s own balance sheet.”

Although Nvidia is pouring money into publicly traded partners, those bets are dwarfed by the chipmaker’s investment in OpenAI.

The $30 billion Nvidia poured into OpenAI in late February came more than a decade after the companies first started working together, but they have become increasingly intertwined since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, which sparked the generative AI craze.

Nvidia’s investment in OpenAI was initially going to be much larger. In September, the companies said Nvidia would invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI over time as the AI ​​company deployed 10 gigawatts of Nvidia’s systems. This deal was never implemented as OpenAI moved away from developing data centers and instead turned mainly to partners such as: SeerMicrosoft and Amazon will pool as much capacity as possible.

Huang said in March that investing $100 billion in OpenAI was probably “not in the cards” and that the $30 billion deal “could be one last check” before an IPO that could happen this year.

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