Nvidia has become one of the world's largest corporate backers of tech companies as the value of its equity investments soared more than tenfold in the past year to $99 billion, with the chip giant increasingly looking to leverage its huge capital reserves to bolster the AI sector.
The company has ramped up dealmaking for financing rounds across the AI stack in the previous 12 months, with over $40 billion committed in 2026. Equity investments were valued at $99 billion as of July 26, up from about $7 billion a year earlier and about $2.2 billion two years earlier.
The rise in value puts Nvidia among the strategic investors with the largest tech holdings around the world. The company still trails some more established tech firms, with Alphabet and Amazon both posting equity investments worth over $100 billion in recent earnings.
Capital has increasingly become a key play for Nvidia.
In August, the company announced partnerships with major investment firms aimed at mobilizing more than $500 billion worth of financing for Nvidia's graphics processing units (GPUs) and said it would provide up to $105 billion of conditional credit support for an OpenAI data center in Ohio. Nvidia also announced Thursday it is planning to acquire AI startup Hugging Face for $12.9 billion.
Frontier labs, neoclouds and companies building software and novel tech for AI — both in private and public markets — have been recipients of cash, with the value of Nvidia's equity holdings also buoyed by skyrocketing tech stocks.
Nvidia made the investments to enhance its growth opportunities, cultivate its ecosystem and strengthen its competitive position, the company said in its earnings.
"Nvidia has a clear interest in ensuring that its customers and partners prosper to provide future business for Nvidia," Ian Fogg, research director at CCS Insight, told CNBC. "Equity investments help companies to innovate, but also give Nvidia a degree of control to encourage companies to take a Nvidia-related innovation path."
Securing positioning
Nvidia dominates the market for the most advanced chips used for AI, known as graphics processing units (GPUs). Business has boomed as a result.
The chip giant has seen its stock increase by 33% over the past 12 months, and its revenue soared 106% to $96.2 billion in its fiscal second quarter.
"Nvidia is keen to diversify its AI business," said Fogg. "In its most recent quarter, $48.7bn of $96.2bn revenue came from the Hyperscale segment which includes the largest cloud players."
The company is taking steps including financing and equity investments to "increase the range of customers and create an AI ecosystem," he added. "Some aim to support emergent cloud providers, others help Nvidia grow new markets, like telecom for example with the $1bn Nokia equity investment."
Frontier AI labs have been major recipients of Nvidia splashing the cash. The chip giant's Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress told analysts on an earnings call that the company had invested "nearly $50 billion in the frontier AI labs."
Most recently, in February, Nvidia said it would invest $30 billion into OpenAI as part of the company's $110 billion funding round.
While frontier AI labs had "extraordinary" demand for compute, they were growing faster than balance sheets and credit profiles could support and struggled to secure AI factory infrastructure independently, Kress added. "Nvidia is needed to help power this flywheel."
Neoclouds, which buy Nvidia GPUs and then rent access to companies, such as Nebius and CoreWeave, have also courted the chip giant. January saw Nvidia invest $2 billion into CoreWeave and in March it was announced that Nebius secured a $2 billion investment.
"By injecting capital directly into AI infrastructure financiers, specialized cloud providers and foundation model 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 technological areas. Since March, Nvidia has committed at least $6.5 billion into companies developing photonics and optical technology — which uses light to transmit data and is considered to be a more efficient alternative to transferring data using electricity.
Lumentum, Coherent and Marvell each received $2 billion investments from the tech giant.
"Optics/networking specialists, like Coherent, receive investments to ensure their tooling, NVLink protocols and design engines remain strictly optimized for Nvidia's architecture," said Chhabra. "This creates high switching costs and protects the CUDA software moat against competing accelerators from AMD or internal custom chips from cloud providers."
Nvidia has also seen its $5 billion investment in Intel soar to a value of $30 billion, while its SpaceX holding was worth $21 billion as of June.
"As global AI chip demand runs into physical supply constraints particularly around high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and advanced packaging, Nvidia uses strategic equity positions like in domestic manufacturing options like Intel, to secure priority manufacturing access, reduce Asian foundry concentration risk and stabilize key component supplies," said Chhabra.