- NVIDIA has committed more than $40B to AI equity investments in the first four months of 2026.
- Every investment comes bundled with a commercial agreement — Nvidia is financing its own supply chain and locking in customers simultaneously
- The strategy raises a conflict-of-interest question that nobody has fully answered: what happens when Nvidia’s investment interests and its customers’ interests diverge?
NVIDIA has committed more than $40 billion to AI-related investments in the first few months of 2026, becoming one of the biggest investors in the space, according to CNBC.
The biggest part of that total is NVIDIA’s $30 billion investment in OpenAI, announced in late February, and one of the largest AI financing deals ever recorded. It has also signed a string of multi-billion-dollar deals with public companies this year, including up to $3.2 billion in Corning and up to $2.1 billion in data centre operator IREN.
NVIDIA aims to support the growth of the AI industry by ensuring sufficient resources and infrastructure, primarily through its own systems. This includes investing in companies that make AI models, cloud services, data centres, and networking technologies.
The company has also invested $2 billion in Marvell Technology and another $2 billion each in Lumentum and Coherent, all of which are working on photonics technology. Earlier, Nvidia also invested $2 billion in CoreWeave and $2 billion in Nebius Group, both tied to the expansion of AI cloud and data centre capacity.
According to the company, it generated $97 billion in free cash flow in its last fiscal year, giving it the financial muscle to back customers, partners and suppliers at a scale few others can match. Its private-company and infrastructure investments reached $17.5 billion last fiscal year, while the value of its private holdings rose sharply year over year.
NVIDIA’s bets on component makers make sense, as they help accelerate the development of products the AI sector badly needs. But investments in cloud and infrastructure companies raise tougher questions, especially when those companies are also major buyers of Nvidia hardware.
