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.
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.