Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gestures as U.S. President Donald Trump (not pictured) delivers remarks through the “Winning the AI Race” Summit in Washington D.C., U.S., July 23, 2025.
Kent Nishimura | Reuters
Nvidia this week stated it’s going to make investments $100 billion into OpenAI in a deal that highlights simply how huge the chipmaker’s investment portfolio has turn out to be because the arrival of generative AI in 2022.
That deal got here only one week after Nvidia dedicated a $5 billion investment into one-time rival Intel, and after the corporate introduced its intention to make $500 million investment into self-driving automotive startup Wayve and a £500 million ($667.7 million) investment into U.K. cloud provider Nscale.
Nvidia’s investment spending spree underscores the chipmaker’s ascendance to the highest of Silicon Valley’s pecking order, offering capital and entry to its extremely desired synthetic intelligence chips in trade for fairness and perception into the place among the hottest AI startups are headed.
If the total OpenAI investment is accomplished — it’s anticipated to be carried out over an unspecified variety of years — it will symbolize Nvidia’s largest investment ever.
Nvidia in August disclosed in a monetary filing that it owned $4.33 billion in publicly traded holdings, together with Applied Digital, Arm, CoreWeave, Nebius Group, Recursion Pharmaceuticals and WeRide.
At the top of July, Nvidia valued its nonmarketable fairness securities at $3.8 billion, up from $1.8 billion a 12 months in the past.
The majority of Nvidia’s portfolio corporations have some strategic connection to the corporate’s enterprise, both creating complementary expertise to its chips, promoting rented entry to its chips or utilizing the chips for AI, enterprise software program or robotics.
But simply because Nvidia is on an organization’s cap desk does not imply it is one of many chipmaker’s clients.
“We do not require any of the companies we invest in to use Nvidia technology,” an organization spokesperson informed CNBC.
For instance, Nvidia’s deal with OpenAI merely makes it the “preferred” computing energy provider to the startup, not an unique supplier. Cohere, an enterprise AI startup that Nvidia participated in funding rounds for, announced this week that it’ll use AMD chips along with Nvidia’s.
In 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT and made the broader world conscious of the significance of Nvidia’s graphics processing items. Since then, Nvidia’s market cap has grown from simply over $420 billion to about $4.3 trillion whereas its annual income has elevated by 383% from $27 billion within the firm’s fiscal 2023 to $130.5 billion within the fiscal 12 months resulted in January.
The 12 months ChatGPT first debuted, Nvidia made 16 investments into different corporations, together with seed rounds and stakes acquired by means of incubators, in line with a CNBC evaluation of PitchBook knowledge. Nvidia’s investments rose to 41 in 2024, and to this point in 2025, the chipmaker has made 51 such offers, not counting its dedication to OpenAI.
To ensure, Nvidia is often simply certainly one of a number of traders for many of its enterprise capital transactions. Nvidia declined to supply CNBC greenback figures, however its sheer variety of enterprise and public fairness investments reveals how central the corporate has turn out to be to the AI ecosystem.
Nvidia has growing money movement from its rising gross sales and the regulatory setting round acquisitions remains to be troublesome, stated Neuberger Berman analyst Jamie Zakalik. The OpenAI deal is a “win-win” as a result of it permits Nvidia to spend a few of that money and acquire affect on the implementation of synthetic intelligence utilizing its chips, she stated.
“Nvidia has a lot of capital that they don’t necessarily have a ton of avenues to do stuff with,” Zakalik stated.
Regulators usually don’t fret about “vertical” investments or acquisitions during which an organization like Nvidia takes a stake in a provider or buyer, stated Alden Abbott, a analysis fellow on the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. But regulators would scrutinize investments with unique provide contracts, that are unlikely on this case due to how briskly AI is transferring, he stated.
These investments is also a clue as to what corporations Nvidia could also be concerned with shopping for. Earlier this 12 months, the chipmaker acquired CentML after collaborating in its 2023 seed spherical. Nvidia additionally invested in Enfabrica, an infrastructure networking agency, earlier than spending $900 million to rent its CEO and license its expertise, CNBC reported final week.
What Nvidia owns
Nvidia’s investments span quite a lot of applied sciences, starting from chips, biotech, robotics and self-driving automobiles. They embrace among the main AI mannequin corporations, which use huge portions of Nvidia’s chips to course of enormous quantities of knowledge and create AI fashions.
The chipmaker has invested an unspecified quantity in OpenAI in a number of rounds, that newest of which valued it at $500 billion. It contributed to a 1.7 billion euro spherical ($2 billion) into French startup Mistral AI in September, participated in a spherical that raised $100 million for Cohere in August and was a part of a spherical that raised $307 million for Runway over a number of rounds.
Nvidia’s additionally reportedly participated in a April $2 billion spherical for Safe Superintelligence, the lab began by former OpenAI luminary Ilya Sutskever. Nvidia additionally participated in a $2 billion July funding spherical for Thinking Machine Labs, the corporate began by former OpenAI working chief Mira Murati.
Some of Nvidia’s investments have already seen exits. It was an investor in Scale AI, an organization that cleaned and created knowledge for AI startups. That startup entered right into a $14.3 billion hiring and licensing deal with Meta that noticed its CEO and different workers be a part of the social media firm.
Nvidia additionally has 7% stake in CoreWeave, a cloud supplier that sells entry to Nvidia’s chips. CoreWeave had a profitable initial public offering earlier this 12 months.
CoreWeave is likely one of the neo-cloud suppliers which are competing and partnering with the big cloud corporations equivalent to Microsoft, Google and Amazon. CoreWeave disclosed a $6.3 billion order from Nvidia earlier this month.
Nvidia additionally participated in fellow neo-cloud supplier Lambda Labs’ $480 million Series D spherical in February.
Some of Nvidia’s most fascinating investments are in corporations which are creating quantum computer systems, a still-theoretical expertise that some consider may in the future supercharge AI growth. Quantum corporations can use Nvidia’s chips to simulate their computer systems that do not exist but.
Nvidia’s stakes in these corporations got here after CEO Jensen Huang apologized to the trade at an Nvidia convention after certainly one of his stray quips a few pessimistic timeline for the expertise sunk their stocks.
Earlier this month, Nvidia’s enterprise capital arm was a participant in a $1 billion round for PsiQuantum, and the chipmaker pitched into early stage funding for Quantinuum in September.
Having Nvidia on an organization’s cap desk could make it extra enticing to traders. In latest years, after Nvidia has revealed stakes in public corporations, traders have bought up the shares, even with tangential connections to AI. Intel’s inventory rose 18% the day that Nvidia introduced its investment.
Correction: Quantinuum had a spherical of funding in September. An earlier model misstated the month.
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