Nvidia's Equity Investment Commitments Top $40 Billion This Year as It Ramps Up Role as AI Investor

Nvidia is pushing its strategy of tying together the entire AI infrastructure supply chain even further, committing over $40 billion in equity investments this year. This week, it secured the right to invest up to $3.2 billion in Corning and up to $2.1 billion in IREN.

• Corning will build 3 new U.S. facilities dedicated to optical technology for Nvidia.
• IREN will adopt DSX infrastructure design at up to 5GW scale.

Major bets have also extended to publicly traded companies.

• OpenAI: $30 billion investment
• Intel: initial $5 billion investment now expanded to a value of over $25 billion
• Marvell Technology, Lumentum, Coherent, CoreWeave, Nebius Group: investments of several billion dollars each

Nvidia put $17.5 billion into private companies and infrastructure funds last year, and as of the end of January, its privately held equity-like assets stood at $22.25 billion, up sharply from $3.39 billion a year earlier. Over the same period, related unrealized gains reached $8.92 billion. Last fiscal year's $97 billion in free cash flow has funded this expansion, but some analysts view it as closer to dot-com-era vendor financing and are wary about the authenticity of the demand.

Jensen Huang said Nvidia isn't picking specific winners but is supporting all foundation model companies. However, the $30 billion investment in OpenAI could be a final check before its IPO, and a larger $100 billion initiative that was reportedly discussed earlier has effectively fallen through due to OpenAI's change in data center strategy.