Jensen Huang is feeling spendy. In the span of a few weeks, the Nvidia CEO has committed billions to deals and investments — with more potentially right around the corner.
The spending spree shows how far Nvidia is expanding beyond chips and raises a bigger question: how much of the AI ecosystem does it want a hand in?
Nvidia said in its earnings report on Wednesday that it has $18 billion committed to equity investments for the rest of the fiscal year, with a focus on AI model makers, infrastructure financiers, and other private companies.
It held $47.9 billion in private companies as of late July — more than double the $22.3 billion it held at the end of the last fiscal year
Many of these deals aren’t outright acquisitions. Luke Lango, chief technology analyst at InvestorPlace, said that licensing technology, hiring talent, and taking minority stakes can help avoid some of the regulatory scrutiny and integration headaches that can accompany an acquisition.
Nvidia is spreading its bets
Nvidia’s expansion comes as some of its biggest customers are moving onto its turf. As Amazon, Google, and Microsoft build their own chips, Nvidia is pushing further into the infrastructure, software, and models that surround them.
In August, Nvidia announced it had invested $1.5 billion in SB Energy and taken a stake in Cloverleaf Infrastructure — two companies helping to solve the land and power crunch posed by data centers.
On the financing front, it teamed up with Wall Street firms to raise more than $500 billion in outside funding for AI infrastructure.
It also struck a multibillion-dollar deal with coding startup Poolside and is reportedly eyeing investments or deals with the AI search startup Perplexity and Korean inference chip startup Rebellions.
Nvidia disclosed Wednesday that it made a $2.94 billion cash payment related to its deal with AI hardware startup Groq, announced in December.
The aggressive dealmaking comes with risks — and feeds a familiar criticism about circular financing.
“Nvidia is now supplier, financer, and shareholder to many of the same companies buying its chips,” Lango said, “so a slowdown would hit its own revenue and its equity stakes at once.”
On the earnings call on Wednesday, Nvidia chief financial officer Colette Kress said that while some say the company is doing circular financing, “we see it differently.”
“We believe these investments, measured against the strength of their demand, the business they create for us, the ecosystem they build on Nvidia’s platform, and the equity returns on our invested capital, will be excellent, and our risk is limited,” Kress said on the call.
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