Nvidia Pushes Past $40 Billion in AI Equity Bets, Fueling Entire AI Supply Chain

NVIDIA stepped on the gas last year, pouring capital into companies across the AI infrastructure stack and backing businesses that could, in turn, purchase the chipmaker's Technology. The strategy has proved lucrative: a $5billionbetonIntelisnowworthover$25 billion, delivering a historic return in a matter of months.

In 2026, the pace of dealmaking has shifted into overdrive. Nvidia has already topped $40billionincommitments,broadeningitsportfoliotoincludemorepubliclytradedequities\mathrm{.}Thisweekalone,NvidiareachedanagreementwithdatacenteroperatorIREN,securingtherighttoinvestupto$2.1 billion, a day after striking a pACT with Corning that allows it to invest up to $3.2 billion in the 175-year-old glass maker. Shares of both IREN and Corning jumped on the announcements.

Nvidia remAIns the biggest winner of the Artificial Intelligence boom, manufacturing the graphics processing units essential for training AI models and running large-scale workloads. The global race to secure GPUs has lifted Nvidia’s stock more than 11-fold in four years, propelling the company to a roughly $5.2 trillion market capitalization and making it the world's most valuable business.

To extend its dominance beyond chips, Nvidia is financing the entire AI supply chain, ensuring it runs on Nvidia hardware and that sufficient capacity exists to meet demand. Yet concerns are growing in some corners of AI that Nvidia—like cloud providers Google and Amazon—is investing in other companies as a way to fuel its own growth.

Nvidia, which generated $97 billion in free cash flow last fiscal year, is backing some of the very companies that buy its chips and, in certain cases, leasing compute capacity back to them. Critics have drawn Comparisons to the vendor financing that helped inflate the dot-com bubble. Matthew Bryson, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, noted that Nvidia’s Investments fit “squarely into the circular investment theme” driving fears about market durability, though he added that the strategy could underscore Nvidia’s vision and create a “competitive moat” if executed well. An Nvidia spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Nvidia has signed at least seven multibillion-dollar investments this year with publicly traded companies and participated in roughly two dozen funding rounds for private companies, including some early-stage deals, according to FactSet.

‘We don’t pick winners’
The single largest bet was a $30 billion investment in ChatGPT creator and longtime partner OpenAI. Nvidia also joined massive funding rounds for anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI, shortly before its merger with SpaceX in February. “There are so many great, amazing Foundation Model companies, and we try to invest in all of them,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said during an April podcast. “We don’t pick winners. We need to support everyone.”

With Nvidia’s fiscal first-quarter earnings report less than two weeks away, shareholders will gain a clearer view of the portfolio’s size and financial impact. During the last fiscal year, Nvidia invested $17.5billioninprivatecompaniesandinfrastructurefunds,primarilytosupportearly-stagestartups\mathrm{.}Non-marketableequitysecuritiesonNvidia\text{’}sbalancesheetswelledto$22.25 billion at the end of January, from $3.39billionayearearlier\mathrm{.}Thecompanyreportedgainsonthoseassetsandpubliclyheldequitiesof$8.92 billion, up from $1.03 billion in the prior fiscal year, partly driven by the Intel investment, which has surged over 200% this year.

The IREN deal includes an agreement to deploy up to 5 gigawatts of Nvidia’s DSX-branded infrastructure designs globally. Under the Corning pact, the glass maker is building three new U.S. facilities dedicated to optical technologies for Nvidia, likely shifting toward fiber-optic cables for rack-scale systems. In March, Nvidia invested $2 billion in Marvell Technology as part of a Silicon photonics partnership, alongside matching investments in Lumentum and Coherent, both photonics developers.

Nvidia also directed capital into so-called neoclouds. It invested $2 billion in CoreWeave in January, involving data center buildouts using Nvidia technology, and the Same amount in Nebius Group, an AI Cloud company, under an agreement covering infrastructure deployment, fleet management, inference, and AI Factory design.

Mizuho chip analyst Jordan Klein called the component-maker deals “super smart” for accelerating development of critical, supply-constrained technologies, but described the NeoCloud investments as “more questionable,” adding that they “smell like you are pre-funding the purchase of your own GPUs.” Ben Bajarin of Creative Strategies warned that if the cycle turns, the market may question how much demand was organic versus supported by Nvidia’s own balance sheet.

The $30billionOpenAIinvestmentdwarfsNvidia\text{’}sotherpubliclytradedwagers\mathrm{.}Monthsearlier,thecompanieshaddiscussedapotential$100 billion commitment as openai planned to deploy 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems, but the deal never materialized after OpenAI pivoted away from developing its own data centers, leaning instead on partners such as Oracle, Microsoft, and Amazon. Huang said in March that a $100billioninvestmentisprobably\text{“}notinthecards\text{”}andthatthe$30 billion deal “might be the last time” Nvidia writes a check before a possible OpenAI IPO this year.