- This week Nvidia agreed to invest up to $3.2 billion in glass maker Corning and $2.1 billion in data center operator IREN.
- It’s part of the company’s aggressive strategy to take stakes in companies up and down the AI infrastructure stack while also doing commercial deals with them.
- Matthew Bryson, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, said in a note that Nvidia’s dealmaking fits “squarely into the circular investment theme.”
Nvidia stepped on the gas last year, putting cash into companies up and down the AI infrastructure stack and helping to fund businesses that could turn around and buy the chipmaker’s technology. It’s been a lucrative endeavor, as the company’s $5 billion bet on Intel is now worth over $25 billion, a historic return in a matter of months.
In 2026, the pace of deals has kicked into overdrive, with Nvidia already topping $40 billion in commitments and expanding its portfolio to include more public equities.
This week alone Nvidia forged an agreement with data center operator IREN, giving it the right to invest up to $2.1 billion in the company, a day after Nvidia struck a pact with Corning, allowing it to invest up to $3.2 billion in the 175-year-old glass maker. Shares of IREN and Corning popped on the announcements.
Nvidia has been the biggest winner of the artificial intelligence boom, producing the graphics processing units required to train AI models and run large workloads. The global scramble to secure GPUs has lifted Nvidia’s stock by more than 11-fold in four years, propelling the company to a roughly $5.2 trillion market cap and making it the most valuable business in the world.
To help the company grow its dominance beyond chips, Nvidia is financing the entire AI supply chain, ensuring it runs on Nvidia hardware and that there’s sufficient capacity to meet demand. But there’s growing concern in some corners of AI that Nvidia — like cloud providers Google and Amazon — is investing in other companies as a way to fuel its own growth.
Nvidia, which generated $97 billion in free cash flow last fiscal year, is backing some of the very companies that buy its chips and, in some cases, is leasing compute right back to them. Critics have compared it to the vendor financing that helped inflate the dot-com bubble.
Matthew Bryson, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, said in a note that Nvidia’s investments and buildouts fit “squarely into the circular investment theme” that’s been driving fears around the market’s durability. However, Bryson sees the investments as underscoring Nvidia’s vision and creating a “competitive moat” if the company can execute.
An Nvidia spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Nvidia has signed at least seven multibillion-dollar investments this year with publicly traded companies. Additionally, it’s been part of roughly two dozen investment rounds in private companies, including some relatively early-stage deals, according to FactSet.
‘We don’t pick winners’
Its single largest bet was a $30 billion check for ChatGPT creator and longtime partner OpenAI. Nvidia also participated in massive funding rounds for Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI, shortly before it merged with SpaceX in February.
“There are so many great, amazing foundation model companies, 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 fiscal first quarter less than two weeks away, shareholders will get a clearer picture of the size of the company’s expanding portfolio and its impact on financials.
During the last fiscal year, Nvidia invested $17.5 billion in private companies 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 that purchase its products directly or through cloud service providers.
Non-marketable equity securities (which are private company investments) held on Nvidia’s balance sheet swelled to $22.25 billion at the end of January from $3.39 billion a year earlier. The company reported gains on those assets as well as publicly held equities of $8.92 billion, up from $1.03 billion in the prior fiscal year, in part due its investment in Intel, which has turned into a stock market darling this year, up well over 200%.
On Nvidia’s last earnings call in February, Huang said, “Our investments are focused very squarely, strategically on expanding and deepening our ecosystem reach.”
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/05/09/nvidia-embraces-ai-investor-topping-40-billion-in-equity-bets-2026.html
