Nvidia Founder and CEO Jensen Huang speaks at the 29th Milken Institute Global Conference at the Beverly Hilton on May 4, 2026 in Beverly Hills, California.
Patrick T. Fallon | AFP | Getty Images
Nvidia stepped on the gas last year, putting money into companies up and down the AI infrastructure stack and helping fund companies that might pivot and acquire its technology. The company bet $5 billion on it, and it was a lucrative endeavor. intel Its current value is over $25 billion, and it will deliver historic profits in a matter of months.
In 2026, the pace of deals will heat up, with Nvidia already having more than $40 billion in contract value and expanding its portfolio to include more public stocks.
This week alone, Nvidia signed deals with data center operators. AirenThe day after the company signed a deal with Nvidia that gives it the right to invest up to $2.1 billion in the company. corningThis will allow the company to invest up to $3.2 billion in the 175-year-old glass manufacturer. Shares of IREN and Corning soared following the announcement.
Nvidia has been the biggest winner of the artificial intelligence boom, making the graphics processing units needed to train AI models and run large-scale workloads. The global scramble to secure GPUs has seen Nvidia’s stock price rise more than 11 times in four years, giving the company a market capitalization of about $5.2 trillion, making it the world’s most valuable company.
To increase Nvidia’s advantage beyond chips, Nvidia is funding the entire AI supply chain to ensure that AI runs on Nvidia hardware and that there is enough capacity to meet demand. But there are growing concerns about Nvidia in some areas of AI, including cloud providers. google and Amazon — Investing in other companies as a way to accelerate our own growth.
Nvidia, which generated $97 billion in free cash flow last year, backs some of the companies that buy its chips and, in some cases, leases out the computing outright. Critics compare 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 investment and build-up “fits right into the theme of cyclical investing” that has raised concerns about market durability. But Bryson believes the investment underscores Nvidia’s vision and creates a “moat of competition” if the company can execute.
An Nvidia spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Nvidia has signed at least seven multibillion-dollar investments with publicly traded companies this year. Additionally, it is part of about two dozen investment rounds in private companies, including relatively early-stage deals, according to FactSet.
“We don’t pick winners.”
Its biggest stake was a $30 billion check to OpenAI, ChatGPT’s creator and longtime partner. Nvidia also participated in a large funding round for Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI just before merging with SpaceX in February.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said during a podcast appearance in April that there are “a lot of great, great foundational model companies out there, and we’re trying to invest in all of them.” “We’re not going to pick winners. We need to support everyone.”
With less than two weeks until Nvidia’s fiscal first-quarter earnings report, shareholders will get a clearer picture of the size of the company’s growing portfolio and its financial impact.
According to its annual report to the SEC, NVIDIA invested $17.5 billion in private companies and infrastructure funds during the past fiscal year “primarily to support early-stage startups.” The company said these investments include AI model companies that purchase products directly or through cloud service providers.
Non-marketable equity (investments in private companies) held on Nvidia’s balance sheet rose to $22.25 billion at the end of January, up from $3.39 billion a year earlier. The company reported gains on those assets and public equity of $8.92 billion, up from $1.03 billion in the previous fiscal year, up more than 200%, in part due to its investment in Intel, which has become a stock market darling this year.
“Our investments are very squarely and strategically focused on expanding and deepening the reach of our ecosystem,” Huang said during NVIDIA’s last earnings call in February.
This week’s IREN deal includes an agreement for the data center company to deploy up to 5 gigawatts of Nvidia’s DSX-branded infrastructure design aimed at powering AI workloads at facilities around the world.
As part of the deal with Corning, the glass company is building three new U.S. facilities dedicated to optical technology for Nvidia, which will likely use fiber-optic cables instead of copper wire when building rack-scale systems.
In March, NVIDIA invested $2 billion. marvel technology As part of a strategic partnership working on silicon photonics technology. I deposited the same amount that month. lumen and reasonabletwo companies developing photonics technology.
Then there is the so-called neo-cloud. In January, NVIDIA invested $2 billion. core weave In a deal that includes building data centers using Nvidia’s technology. We also invested $2 billion nevius grouphas partnered with an AI cloud company as part of an agreement for AI infrastructure deployment, fleet management, inference, and AI factory design.
Jordan Klein, a chip analyst at Mizuho, called the deal with a component maker “a very smart move by the CFO and his team and a great use of capital” because it helps accelerate the development of critical technologies and products that are in short supply. He was more skeptical about investing in Neocloud, saying, “It feels more questionable to me and potential investors.”
“It smells like we’re pre-funding the purchase of our own GPUs and products,” Klein said in an email. Still, he noted that cloud providers have important characteristics that Nvidia needs, such as power and data center capacity.
Creative Strategies’ Ben Bajarin shared similar sentiments about IREN, speaking to CNBC. “The risk is that as the cycle turns, the market begins to question how much of the demand was organic or supported by Nvidia’s own balance sheet.”
While Nvidia is pouring money into publicly traded partners, the stakes are dwarfed by the chipmaker’s investment in OpenAI.
Nvidia’s $30 billion commitment to OpenAI in late February came more than a decade after the two companies began working together, but the two companies have become increasingly intertwined since the announcement of ChatGPT in 2022, which sparked a generative AI frenzy.
Nvidia’s investment in OpenAI was originally planned to be even larger. The companies announced in September that Nvidia would commit up to $100 billion over the long term to OpenAI as the AI company deploys 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems. The deal never took off as OpenAI moved away from data center development and instead relied heavily on partners such as: oracleMicrosoft and Amazon will consolidate as much capacity as possible.
Huang said in March that investing $100 billion in OpenAI was probably “not an option” and that the $30 billion deal “might be the last” the company writes a check before a possible IPO this year.
WATCH: Nvidia’s AI supply chain empire: Here’s what you need to know
