Nvidia founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, speaks during the 29th Annual Milken Institute Global Conference at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, California on May 4, 2026.
Patrick T. Fallon AFP | Getty Images
Nvidia stepped on the gas last year, pouring cash into companies moving up and down the AI infrastructure stack and helping finance businesses that might turn around and buy the chipmaker’s technology. It was a very profitable endeavor, as the company bet 5 billion Intel it is now worth more than $25 billion, a historic return in a matter of months.
In 2026, the pace of deals began to exceed, as Nvidia already has more than 40 billion dollars in bonds and is expanding its portfolio to include more public shares.
Just this week Nvidia struck a deal with a data center operator IRENgiving it the right to invest up to $2.1 billion in the company, the day after Nvidia struck a deal with Corningallowing it to invest up to $3.2 billion in the 175-year-old glassmaker. Shares of IREN and Corning came up in the announcements.
Nvidia has been the biggest winner in the artificial intelligence boom, producing the graphics processing units needed to train AI models and run large tasks. The global race to secure GPUs has boosted Nvidia’s stock more than 11-fold in four years, propelling the company to an estimated $5.2 trillion market cap and making it the world’s most valuable business.
To help the company expand its dominance beyond chips, Nvidia is financing the entire AI supply chain, ensuring that it runs on Nvidia hardware and that there is enough capacity to meet demand. But there are growing concerns in other corners of AI Nvidia — such as cloud providers Google again Amazon – invests in other companies as a way to boost its growth.
Nvidia, which generated $97 billion in free cash flow last fiscal year, supports some of the companies that buy its chips and, in some cases, leases computers back to them. Critics have compared it to the broker-dealer subsidies that helped inflate the dot-com bubble.
Matthew Bryson, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, said that Nvidia’s investment and construction fits “double into the circular investment theme” that has been fueling fears of market volatility. However, Bryson sees the investment as reinforcing Nvidia’s vision and creating a “competitive moat” if the company can do it.
An Nvidia spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Nvidia has signed at least seven billion dollars in investments this year with publicly traded companies. Additionally, it has been part of nearly a dozen investment rounds in private companies, including early stage deals, according to FactSet.
‘We don’t pick winners’
Its single biggest bet was a $30 billion check for ChatGPT creator and longtime partner OpenAI. Nvidia also participated in large funding rounds for xAI by Anthropic and Elon Musk, just before it merged with SpaceX in February.
“There are a lot of great companies, amazing fundamentals, and we try to invest in all of them,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said during an April podcast appearance. “We don’t pick winners. We need to support everyone.”
With Nvidia’s earnings report for its first fiscal quarter less than two weeks away, shareholders will get a clearer picture of the size of the company’s growing portfolio and its financial impact.
Last fiscal year, Nvidia invested $17.5 billion in private equity and infrastructure funds, “primarily to support early-stage startups,” according to its annual filing with the SEC. The company said those investments include AI model companies buying its products directly or through cloud service providers.
Non-marketable equity securities (private equity investments) held on Nvidia’s balance sheet rose to $22.25 billion at the end of January from $3.39 billion a year earlier. The company reported earnings on those assets and publicly held shares of $8.92 billion, up from $1.03 billion in the prior fiscal year, in part because of its investment in Intel, which has become a stock market darling this year, up more than 200%.
In Nvidia’s last earnings call in February, Huang said, “Our investments are focused on expanding and deepening the reach of our ecosystem.”
IREN’s deal this week includes an agreement that the data center company will outsource up to 5 gigawatts of infrastructure projects with Nvidia’s DSX brand aimed at powering AI workloads in centers around the world.
As part of the Corning deal, the glass company is building three new US centers dedicated to Nvidia’s optical technology, which will likely turn to fiber-optic cables instead of copper as it builds its scaling systems.
In March, Nvidia invested $2 billion Marvell Technology as part of a strategic partnership working on silicon photonics technology. That month he deposited the same amount Lumentum again Compatibilitytwo companies that develop imaging technology.
Then there are the so-called neoclouds. In January, Nvidia invested $2 billion CoreWeave in a deal that involves building data centers with Nvidia technology. It also invested $2 billion Nebius Groupan AI cloud company, as part of an agreement to deploy AI infrastructure, fleet management, forecasting and AI factory design.
Chip analyst Jordan Klein at Mizuho called the deals with component makers “very smart by the CFO and the team and a great use of money,” because they help accelerate the development of key technologies and scarce products. He is very skeptical of neocloud investment, he said “I feel very skeptical and possible of investors.”
“It sounds like you’re financing your own GPUs and products,” Klein said in an email. However, he noted that cloud providers have critical attributes such as the power and data center capacity that Nvidia needs.
Ben Bajarin at Creative Strategies shared a similar view about IREN, telling CNBC, “The risk is that when the cycle turns, the market starts to question how much demand there was compared to Nvidia’s balance sheet.”
Just as Nvidia invests in publicly traded partners, those bets are undercut by the manufacturer’s investment in OpenAI.
The $30 billion Nvidia poured into OpenAI in late February came more than a decade after the companies first started working together, though they’ve grown more connected since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, a period that sparked the AI frenzy.
Nvidia’s investment in OpenAI was initially going to be huge. In September, the companies said that Nvidia would be investing up to $100 billion over time in OpenAI as the AI company released 10 gigawatts of Nvidia’s systems. That deal didn’t backfire as OpenAI moved away from developing data centers, instead relying heavily on partners like The OracleMicrosoft and Amazon are putting together as much capacity as possible.
Huang said in March that investing $100 billion in OpenAI is probably “not in the cards,” and that the $30 billion deal “may be the last” check he writes before a possible IPO this year.
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