Nvidia hit the accelerator on its corporate investments last year. The chipmaker pours massive amounts of cash into the entire artificial intelligence supply chain. This year, the pace of these deals reached a completely new level. In 2026 alone, Nvidia crossed $40 billion in financial commitments. The company essentially funds other businesses so they can turn right around and buy Nvidia’s own technology.
This aggressive strategy already makes a lot of money. For example, Nvidia placed a $5 billion bet on Intel. That investment quickly soared to a value of over $25 billion, giving Nvidia a historic return in just a few months. Overall, the global rush to secure computer graphics chips pushed Nvidia stock up by more than 11-fold over the past four years. The company now holds a market value of roughly $5.2 trillion, making it the most valuable business on the planet.
Just this week, Nvidia signed two massive new deals. The company agreed to invest up to $2.1 billion into a data center operator named IREN. Through this deal, IREN will install up to 5 gigawatts of Nvidia hardware to run artificial intelligence programs at facilities around the world. The very next day, Nvidia announced a pact to invest up to $3.2 billion in Corning, a 175-year-old glass manufacturer. Corning will build three new factories in the United States to make fiber-optic cables for Nvidia computer systems. Following the news, shares for both IREN and Corning jumped higher.
Nvidia makes incredible amounts of money from the current technology boom, pulling in $97 billion in free cash flow last year alone. To keep this momentum going, the company finances the very customers that buy its chips. In some cases, Nvidia even leases computer power right back to those same companies. Some critics worry about this practice. They compare it to the risky vendor financing that caused the dot-com bubble to burst years ago.
Matthew Bryson, a financial analyst at Wedbush Securities, noted that Nvidia’s spending looks exactly like circular investing. He pointed out that this cycle makes some people nervous about the long-term durability of the market. However, Bryson also stated that if Nvidia executes its plan well, these investments will build a massive competitive moat around its core business.
So far this year, Nvidia has signed at least seven deals worth billions of dollars with public companies. It also joined about two dozen funding rounds for private startups. Nvidia handed its single largest check, a staggering $30 billion investment, directly to OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. Nvidia also helped fund Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI just before xAI merged with SpaceX in February.
Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang defended this broad spending approach during a podcast interview in April. He explained that many great foundation model companies exist today, and Nvidia tries to invest in all of them. He stated that his company does not pick winners, but rather supports everyone in the industry. During a recent earnings call, Huang added that these investments strategically deepen Nvidia’s reach into the wider technology ecosystem.
The company’s financial documents show exactly how fast this portfolio grows. Last fiscal year, Nvidia spent $17.5 billion backing early-stage private startups. By the end of January, the value of its private company shares ballooned to $22.25 billion, up from just $3.39 billion a year earlier. Its public stock gains also jumped from $1.03 billion to $8.92 billion, largely because Intel stock shot up well over 200 percent.
Beyond the mega-deals, Nvidia spends heavily on specific hardware upgrades to improve network speeds. In March, the company handed $2 billion to Marvell Technology to develop silicon photonics. That same month, Nvidia invested another $2 billion each into Lumentum and Coherent to build similar optical technology. Finally, Nvidia continues to back new cloud providers, dropping $2 billion into CoreWeave in January to help build out brand new data centers.
