Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gestures as U.S. President Donald Trump (not pictured) delivers remarks during the “Winning the AI Race” Summit in Washington D.C., U.S., July 23, 2025.
Kent Nishimura | Reuters
Nvidia this week said it’ll invest $100 billion into OpenAI in a deal that highlights just how big the chipmaker’s investment portfolio has become since the arrival of generative AI in 2022.
That deal came just one week after Nvidia committed a $5 billion investment into one-time rival Intel, and after the company announced its intention to make $500 million investment into self-driving car 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 top of Silicon Valley’s pecking order, providing capital and access to its highly desired artificial intelligence chips in exchange for equity and insight into where some of the hottest AI startups are headed.
If the full OpenAI investment is completed — it is expected to be carried out over an unspecified number of years — it would represent Nvidia’s largest investment ever.
Nvidia in August disclosed in a financial filing that it owned $4.33 billion in publicly traded holdings, including Applied Digital, Arm, CoreWeave, Nebius Group, Recursion Pharmaceuticals and WeRide.
At the end of July, Nvidia valued its nonmarketable equity securities at $3.8 billion, up from $1.8 billion a year ago.
The majority of Nvidia’s portfolio companies have some strategic connection to the company’s business, either developing complementary technology to its chips, selling rented access to its chips or using the chips for AI, enterprise software or robotics.
But just because Nvidia is on a company’s cap table doesn’t mean it’s one of the chipmaker’s customers.
“We do not require any of the companies we invest in to use Nvidia technology,” a company spokesperson told CNBC.
For example, Nvidia’s deal with OpenAI merely makes it the “preferred” computing power supplier to the startup, not an exclusive provider. Cohere, an enterprise AI startup that Nvidia participated in funding rounds for, announced this week that it will use AMD chips in addition to Nvidia’s.
In 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT and made the broader world aware of the importance of Nvidia’s graphics processing units. Since then, Nvidia’s market cap has grown from just over $420 billion to about $4.3 trillion while its annual revenue has increased by 383% from $27 billion in the company’s fiscal 2023 to $130.5 billion in the fiscal year ended in January.
The year ChatGPT first debuted, Nvidia made 16 investments into other companies, including seed rounds and stakes acquired through incubators, according to a CNBC analysis of PitchBook data. Nvidia’s investments rose to 41 in 2024, and so far in 2025, the chipmaker has made 51 such deals, not counting its commitment to OpenAI.
To be sure, Nvidia is usually just one of several investors for most of its venture capital transactions. Nvidia declined to provide CNBC dollar figures, but its sheer number of venture and public equity investments shows how central the company has become to the AI ecosystem.
Nvidia has increasing cash flow from its rising sales and the regulatory environment around acquisitions is still difficult, said Neuberger Berman analyst Jamie Zakalik. The OpenAI deal is a “win-win” because it allows Nvidia to spend some of that cash and gain influence on the implementation of artificial intelligence using its chips, she said.
“Nvidia has a lot of capital that they don’t necessarily have a ton of avenues to do stuff with,” Zakalik said.
Regulators typically don’t worry about “vertical” investments or acquisitions in which a company like Nvidia takes a stake in a supplier or customer, said Alden Abbott, a research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. But regulators would scrutinize investments with exclusive supply contracts, which are unlikely in this case because of how fast AI is moving, he said.
These investments could also be a clue as to what companies Nvidia may be interested in buying. Earlier this year, the chipmaker acquired CentML after participating in its 2023 seed round. Nvidia also invested in Enfabrica, an infrastructure networking firm, before spending $900 million to hire its CEO and license its technology, CNBC reported last week.
What Nvidia owns
Nvidia’s investments span a variety of technologies, ranging from chips, biotech, robotics and self-driving cars. They include some of the leading AI model companies, which use vast quantities of Nvidia’s chips to process huge amounts of data and create AI models.
The chipmaker has invested an unspecified amount in OpenAI in multiple rounds, that latest of which valued it at $500 billion. It contributed to a 1.7 billion euro round ($2 billion) into French startup Mistral AI in September, participated in a round that raised $100 million for Cohere in August and was part of a round that raised $307 million for Runway over multiple rounds.
Nvidia’s also reportedly participated in a April $2 billion round for Safe Superintelligence, the lab started by former OpenAI luminary Ilya Sutskever. Nvidia also participated in a $2 billion July funding round for Thinking Machine Labs, the company started by former OpenAI operating chief Mira Murati.
Some of Nvidia’s investments have already seen exits. It was an investor in Scale AI, a company that cleaned and created data for AI startups. That startup entered into a $14.3 billion hiring and licensing deal with Meta that saw its CEO and other employees join the social media company.
Nvidia also has 7% stake in CoreWeave, a cloud provider that sells access to Nvidia’s chips. CoreWeave had a successful initial public offering earlier this year.
CoreWeave is one of the neo-cloud providers that are competing and partnering with the large cloud companies such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon. CoreWeave disclosed a $6.3 billion order from Nvidia earlier this month.
Nvidia also participated in fellow neo-cloud provider Lambda Labs’ $480 million Series D round in February.
Some of Nvidia’s most interesting investments are in companies that are developing quantum computers, a still-theoretical technology that some believe could one day supercharge AI development. Quantum companies can use Nvidia’s chips to simulate their computers that don’t exist yet.
Nvidia’s stakes in those companies came after CEO Jensen Huang apologized to the industry at an Nvidia conference after one of his stray quips about a pessimistic timeline for the technology sunk their stocks.
Earlier this month, Nvidia’s venture 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 a company’s cap table can make it more attractive to investors. In recent years, after Nvidia has revealed stakes in public companies, investors have bought up the stocks, even with tangential connections to AI. Intel’s stock rose 18% the day that Nvidia announced its investment.
WATCH: Nvidia-OpenAI deal shows capital intensity despite weak commercial monetization: GMO’s Tom Hancock
