Nvidia The company has seen the value of its equity investments soar more than tenfold over the past year to $99 billion, making it one of the world’s largest strategic technology backers. Semiconductor giants are increasingly looking to tap into their vast capital reserves to strengthen the AI sector.
The company has ramped up its deals in funding rounds across the AI stack in the past 12 months, pledging more than $40 billion in 2026. The value of equity investments was $99 billion as of July 26, up from about $7 billion a year ago and about $2.2 billion two years ago.
The increase in value puts Nvidia among the largest strategic investors in technology stocks around the world. The company still lags behind some more established technology companies. alphabet and Amazon Both companies have recorded more than $100 billion worth of equity investments in recent earnings.
Capital plays an increasingly important role for Nvidia.
In August, the company announced a partnership with a major investment firm to raise more than $500 billion for Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) and provide up to $105 billion in conditional credit support for its OpenAI data center in Ohio. Nvidia also announced Thursday plans to acquire AI startup Hugging Face for $12.9 billion.
Frontier Labs, NeoCloud, and other companies that build software and novel technologies for AI have been recipients of cash in both private and public markets, with a surge in tech stocks also boosting the value of Nvidia’s holdings.
Nvidia has made investments to expand growth opportunities, foster its ecosystem and strengthen its competitiveness, the company said in its financial results.
“NVIDIA has a clear interest in ensuring that its customers and partners thrive to provide future business to NVIDIA,” Ian Fogg, director of research at CCS Insight, told CNBC. “Equity investment not only helps companies innovate, but also gives Nvidia some control to encourage companies to follow Nvidia-related innovation paths.”
Ensuring positioning
Nvidia dominates the market for cutting-edge chips used for AI, known as graphics processing units (GPUs). As a result, business boomed.
The semiconductor giant’s stock has risen 33% over the past 12 months, and second-quarter sales rose 106% to $96.2 billion.
Nvidia stock.
“NVIDIA is keen to diversify its AI business,” Fogg said. “In the most recent quarter, $48.7 billion of the $96.2 billion in revenue came from the hyperscale division, which includes the largest cloud players.”
He added that the company is taking steps such as fundraising and equity investments to “expand our customer reach and build our AI ecosystem.” “Some companies aim to support emerging cloud providers, while others support Nvidia’s growth in new markets such as telecommunications with a $1 billion Nokia equity investment.”
Frontier AI Labs has been a huge beneficiary of Nvidia’s significant investment. The semiconductor giant’s chief financial officer, Colette Kress, told analysts on an earnings call that the company had invested “nearly $50 billion in Frontier AI Labs.”
Most recently, in February, Nvidia announced it would invest $30 billion in OpenAI as part of the company’s $110 billion funding round.
Kress added that while Frontier’s AI Lab has “extraordinary” demand for computing, it is growing faster than its balance sheet and credit profile can support and is struggling to secure its own AI Factory infrastructure. “We need Nvidia to power this flywheel.”
Neoclouds purchases Nvidia GPUs and rents access to companies such as: Nevius and coreweaveis also courting chip giants. In January, Nvidia invested $2 billion in CoreWeave, and in March, it was announced that Nebius had secured a $2 billion investment.
“By injecting capital directly into AI infrastructure investors, specialized cloud providers, and underlying modeling labs, Nvidia provides these startups with the balance sheet strength to purchase tens of thousands of Nvidia GPUs,” Naveen Chhabra, principal analyst at Forrester, told CNBC.
The company has also invested in nascent technology areas. Since March, Nvidia has poured at least $6.5 billion into companies developing photonics and optical technologies. This technology uses light to transmit data and is considered a more efficient alternative to transmitting data using electricity.
Lumentum, Coherent, and Marvell each received $2 billion in investments from the tech giant.
“Optical/networking experts like Coherent are invested in ensuring their tools, NVLink protocols, and design engines remain tightly optimized for NVIDIA’s architecture,” Chhabra said. “This incurs high switching costs and protects the CUDA software moat from competing accelerators. AMD or a cloud provider’s internal custom chip. ”
Nvidia also invested $5 billion in: intel The value soars to $30 billion, space x Its holdings were worth $21 billion as of June.
“As global AI chip demand faces physical supply constraints, particularly for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and advanced packaging, Nvidia is leveraging strategic equity positions such as domestic manufacturing options, including: intel“This is to ensure preferential manufacturing access, reduce foundry concentration risks in Asia, and stabilize supply of key components,” Chhabra said.
