NVIDIA’s startup investing didn’t slow down going into 2026, it accelerated, then hit a genuine turning point. The chipmaker closed out 2025 with 67 venture deals (excluding its formal fund), up from 54 in 2024, plus another 30 deals through NVentures. Then, in a single week in early 2026, it finalized its two largest and most consequential bets yet, a $10 billion stake in Anthropic and a $30 billion investment in OpenAI, before CEO Jensen Huang stood on stage in March and said both were likely to be Nvidia’s last major checks to either company.
That’s the story of Nvidia’s investing over the past nine months: bigger checks, faster pace, and then a deliberate step back from picking sides in an AI lab rivalry that’s turned unusually public.
Nvidia Investment Activity by the Numbers
- 67 venture deals in full-year 2025 (excluding NVentures), up from 54 in 2024, per PitchBook
- NVentures alone made 30 deals in 2025 and roughly 20 more in the first five months of 2026
- Biggest single commitments: OpenAI ($30 billion final, down from an earlier $100 billion framework), Anthropic ($10 billion), xAI (up to $2 billion equity)
- Corporate development-led AI equity investments alone exceeded $40 billion in just the first four months of 2026
- Market cap: roughly $4.7-4.8 trillion as of early July 2026, briefly touching $5 trillion+ in late May, making Nvidia the world’s most valuable public company
- Investment focus remains AI model companies, cloud infrastructure, and emerging tech (quantum computing, robotics, biotech)
Nvidia still frames its investing around the same three buckets: AI model companies, cloud infrastructure providers, and frontier technology like quantum computing, fusion energy, and robotics. What’s changed is the appetite for writing nine and ten figure checks into the two companies that arguably matter most to its own future.
The Big Shift: Nvidia Steps Back From OpenAI and Anthropic
This is the most important development since our last update, and it reframes everything else in this article.
What happened: In November 2025, Nvidia and Microsoft jointly announced they would invest up to $10 billion and $5 billion respectively in Anthropic, alongside Anthropic committing to purchase $30 billion of Azure compute capacity. In February 2026, Nvidia finalized a $30 billion investment in OpenAI as part of a roughly $110 billion funding round, a steep reduction from the up-to-$100 billion framework announced the previous September.
Then, on March 4, 2026, speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom conference, Jensen Huang said both investments were likely to be Nvidia’s last major equity checks into either company. His stated reason: both OpenAI and Anthropic were expected to go public later in 2026, and the private-investment window closes once that happens.
The more interesting story sits underneath that explanation. Around the same time, tensions between OpenAI and Anthropic became unusually public. The US government reportedly ordered federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s technology after the company declined to let Claude be deployed for autonomous weapons or mass domestic surveillance. Within hours, OpenAI announced its own Pentagon deal, which Anthropic publicly called “mendacious.” Nvidia found itself holding significant equity in both companies just as they were pulling in opposite directions, commercially and politically. Huang later dismissed the idea that bad blood drove the pullback, but the timing raised questions of its own.
Why it matters for the ecosystem: Nvidia effectively said it doesn’t want to keep picking financial sides between its two biggest customers. Analysts expect this to ripple outward, tighter Series B/C funding environments for AI model companies more broadly, as the signal that even Nvidia sees diminishing returns in AI lab equity spreads through venture capital. It also puts more scrutiny on the remaining web of cross-investments, Microsoft’s stake in OpenAI, Amazon’s stake in Anthropic, Google’s positions in multiple labs, all of which face growing regulatory attention.
Top Nvidia Startup Investments, 2025-2026
1. OpenAI: $30 Billion Final Investment (February 2026)
- Original framework (September 2025): up to $100 billion across 10 tranches
- Actual investment finalized: $30 billion, as part of a roughly $110 billion funding round
- Round valued OpenAI at $852 billion post-money by the time it closed in March 2026
- Structure still ties partly to infrastructure deployment and GPU lease arrangements rather than upfront purchases
The headline number from our last update, up to $100 billion, never fully materialized. Nvidia scaled its actual commitment down to $30 billion, and Huang has said publicly that a $100 billion outcome is “probably not in the cards.” OpenAI’s own valuation still climbed sharply regardless, closing its round at $852 billion with Amazon and SoftBank also anchoring.
2. Anthropic: $10 Billion Investment (November 2025)
- Nvidia commitment: up to $10 billion, alongside a separate $5 billion commitment from Microsoft
- Anthropic committed to purchase $30 billion of Microsoft Azure compute capacity, plus additional capacity up to 1 gigawatt
- Anthropic and Nvidia also announced a deep technology partnership to optimize Claude models for Nvidia architecture and vice versa
- Anthropic’s subsequent Series H in May 2026 raised $65 billion at a $965 billion post-money valuation, overtaking OpenAI’s private mark
This is the biggest new entry since our last update. Anthropic wasn’t previously a named Nvidia portfolio company; it now represents one of Nvidia’s two largest single-company bets, alongside OpenAI. Notably, both Nvidia and Microsoft’s investments arrived as Claude became the only frontier model available across all three major cloud platforms.
3. xAI: Up to $2 Billion Equity in a $20 Billion Round (October 2025)
- Total round size: $20 billion
- Nvidia equity investment: up to $2 billion
- Structure: $7.5 billion equity plus $12.5 billion debt, largely through a special purpose vehicle for GPU purchases
- Chips support xAI’s Colossus 2 data center buildout in Memphis
No major changes here since October, though xAI’s broader capital picture has grown more complex as it consolidated with parts of Musk’s other ventures ahead of its own planned IPO.
4. UK AI Startup Ecosystem: £2 Billion Commitment (September 2025)
Unchanged in structure. Nvidia’s £2 billion (about $2.6 billion) commitment continues flowing through partner VCs (Accel, Air Street Capital, Balderton, Hoxton Ventures, Phoenix Court) into London, Oxford, Cambridge, and Manchester. Nvidia has since extended similar VC Alliance partnerships to European firms including Accel, Elaia, Partech, and Sofinnova, offering DGX Cloud Lepton marketplace credits to portfolio companies across the continent.
5. Mistral AI: €1.7 Billion Series C (September 2025)
Unchanged since our last update. Nvidia remains an investor alongside lead backer ASML, with Mistral valued at €11.7 billion ($13.8 billion).
6. CoreWeave: Nvidia Doubles Down With a Second Investment (Early 2026)
- Original stake: 7% (24.2 million shares), worth roughly $2 billion at IPO
- New: an additional $2 billion investment in early 2026, on top of a prior $6.3 billion agreement to purchase CoreWeave’s unused computing capacity through 2032
Nvidia didn’t just hold its post-IPO CoreWeave stake, it added to it. The combined equity-plus-capacity-purchase relationship makes CoreWeave one of the clearest examples of Nvidia’s circular financing model in practice: invest in the company, then buy back its compute.
7. Synopsys: $2 Billion Investment (Late 2025)
A new addition to the portfolio since our last update. Nvidia invested $2 billion into chip-design software maker Synopsys by the end of 2025, deepening ties between Nvidia’s hardware roadmap and the design tools used to build it.
8. Nebius: $2 Billion Investment (March 2026)
Another new entry. Nvidia invested $2 billion in GPU cloud provider Nebius in March 2026, adding a third major cloud-capacity relationship alongside CoreWeave and Nscale.
9. Nscale: $433 Million SAFE (October 2025)
Unchanged. Nvidia’s £500 million commitment to the UK cloud provider continues, following Nscale’s earlier $1.1 billion raise.
10. Legora: $50 Million Series E (April 2026)
Nvidia’s first direct investment in legal AI. Legora, a Swedish legal-AI startup valued at $5.6 billion and built on Anthropic’s Claude, raised the round days after NVentures also backed Israeli clinical AI company Aidoc’s $150 million Series E, signaling a deliberate push into vertical, inference-heavy application companies rather than only infrastructure and foundation models.
Additional Notable Investments Since October 2025
- PhysicsX and Alice & Bob: NVentures backed physics-simulation platform PhysicsX and French quantum computing startup Alice & Bob in the first half of 2026, continuing Nvidia’s quantum and simulation hedge alongside existing bets like PsiQuantum and Quantinuum
- Generalist AI: $400 Million Round (June 2026): Nvidia and Fei-Fei Li backed this AI robotics startup’s round alongside Radical Ventures and Bezos Expeditions
- XBOW: $35 Million Series C Extension (May 2026): NVentures joined Accenture and DNX Ventures in backing this offensive security-testing startup
- Redwood Materials: Nvidia invested in the battery and energy-storage company to help power AI data centers, an increasingly common pattern as compute buildouts strain grid capacity
- Quantinuum: Went public on Nasdaq in June 2026, another exit for Nvidia’s quantum computing bets, following Cerebras’s IPO earlier in the year
Investment Categories and Distribution (Updated)
By Sector:
- AI Model Companies: still the largest share, though Anthropic’s addition and OpenAI’s reduced check size shift the dollar-weighted mix
- Cloud Infrastructure: growing, with new entries (Nebius, continued CoreWeave) alongside existing bets (Crusoe, Lambda, Nscale)
- Emerging Tech: expanding fastest in deal count, quantum computing (Alice & Bob, PsiQuantum, Quantinuum), fusion (Commonwealth Fusion), and energy storage (Redwood Materials)
- Vertical Applications: a newer category taking shape, with legal AI (Legora), clinical AI (Aidoc), and robotics (Generalist AI, Figure AI) all drawing fresh checks in 2026
By Geography: US deals remain the majority, but Nvidia’s European push, through both direct investment and the VC Alliance program, has visibly expanded since late 2025, particularly in France, the UK, and the broader EU AI ecosystem.
How Nvidia’s Investment Strategy Works
The Circular Financing Model, Under More Scrutiny
The core pattern hasn’t changed: Nvidia invests in a startup, the startup uses much of that capital to buy Nvidia GPUs or lease Nvidia-powered cloud capacity. CoreWeave remains the clearest example, an equity stake plus a $6.3 billion compute-purchase agreement running through 2032. Critics have long called this circular financing, and the scrutiny has intensified as the dollar figures involved have grown into the tens of billions per deal.
What’s different now is that Nvidia’s own leadership has started publicly distancing itself from at least part of this pattern, specifically the practice of holding equity in AI labs that increasingly compete with each other and, at times, with Nvidia’s own DGX Cloud and NIM inference offerings. Whether Nvidia extends that same caution to its cloud-infrastructure bets (CoreWeave, Nebius, Nscale, Lambda) remains to be seen; those relationships show no signs of slowing.
Two-Layer Investment Structure
Nvidia’s dealmaking effectively runs through two teams operating at very different scales:
- Corporate Development (led by Vishal Bhagwati): handles the largest strategic checks, OpenAI, Anthropic, Synopsys, CoreWeave, Nebius, xAI. This is where the $30-billion-plus commitments live.
- NVentures (led by Mohamed “Sid” Siddeek, a two-person team): handles earlier-stage, higher-volume deals across nearly every sector Nvidia can technically reach, from quantum computing to legal AI to robotics. NVentures has backed 80+ companies since 2021, including 20 that reached unicorn status.
Revenue and Market Position
Nvidia Financial Performance (Q1 FY2027, reported May 20, 2026):
- Revenue: $81.6 billion, up 85% year over year and 20% quarter over quarter, a record
- Data center revenue: $75.2 billion, up 92% year over year, also a record
- GAAP gross margin: 74.9%
- The board approved an additional $80 billion share buyback authorization in May 2026, on top of returning roughly $20 billion to shareholders in the quarter alone
- Quarterly dividend increased from $0.01 to $0.25 per share, effective late June 2026
Customer concentration remains a live risk factor. Nvidia’s top customers still represent a large share of data center revenue, and CEO commentary continues to acknowledge that concentrated demand from a handful of hyperscalers and AI labs, several of which Nvidia also holds equity in, cuts both ways: it drives extraordinary growth, but it also means Nvidia’s fortunes are tightly bound to a small number of counterparties’ spending decisions.
Comparison With Other Tech Giants
Microsoft: Beyond its long-standing OpenAI relationship, Microsoft co-invested alongside Nvidia in Anthropic’s November 2025 round ($5 billion), while Anthropic committed $30 billion to Azure compute in return, deepening a three-way relationship that didn’t exist in our last update.
Google: Continues balancing its own Anthropic investment with broader AI infrastructure bets, and remains notable as the source of the TPU training capacity that both Gemini and portions of Claude’s training run on, an alternative to Nvidia silicon that Huang has publicly acknowledged as the one meaningful defection at scale.
Amazon: Invested $50 billion into OpenAI as part of the same February 2026 round that included Nvidia’s $30 billion, tied to roughly 2 gigawatts of AWS Trainium capacity over eight years, alongside its existing, larger commitment to Anthropic.
Meta: Its Scale AI acquihire remains the standout AI-talent deal of the era; more recently Meta has shifted toward monetizing its own infrastructure directly through Meta Compute rather than expanding equity stakes in other labs.
Investment Activity Timeline
- 2022: 16 corporate deals, 1 NVentures deal
- 2024: 54 corporate deals
- 2025 (full year): 67 corporate deals, 30 NVentures deals, largest single commitments including the OpenAI framework and the November Anthropic investment
- 2026 (through Q2): NVentures alone completed roughly 20 deals in the first five months; corporate development-led AI equity investments exceeded $40 billion in the first four months alone, driven largely by the finalized OpenAI and Anthropic checks
Looking Ahead
What’s already changed from our earlier 2026 predictions: We expected continued expansion into Asia, the Middle East, healthcare AI, and robotics, and that’s broadly held, Legora (legal AI), Aidoc (clinical AI), and Generalist AI (robotics) all point that direction. What we didn’t anticipate was Nvidia explicitly stepping back from its two largest AI lab bets just months after finalizing them.
What to watch through the rest of 2026:
- Whether OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s expected IPOs actually arrive this year or slip into 2027, and what that means for Nvidia’s stated rationale for pulling back
- Whether regulatory scrutiny in the US and EU moves from informal attention to formal investigation
- Whether Nvidia’s cloud-infrastructure investments (CoreWeave, Nebius, Nscale, Lambda) face the same reconsideration as its AI-lab equity, or continue expanding unchecked
- Continued acceleration in vertical, inference-heavy application investments as Nvidia positions itself less as a chip supplier and more as, in its own words, an AI infrastructure platform
Conclusion
Nvidia’s 2025-2026 investment activity tells two stories. The first is more of the same, faster pace, bigger checks, continued expansion into cloud infrastructure, quantum computing, and now vertical AI applications like legal and clinical tools. The second is a genuine inflection point: Nvidia finalized its two largest AI lab investments ever, $30 billion into OpenAI and $10 billion into Anthropic, and then almost immediately signaled it was done making that kind of bet, as the two companies’ rivalry turned public and political.
For entrepreneurs and investors, the signal is worth taking seriously. Even the company with the deepest pockets and the clearest strategic interest in a thriving AI ecosystem is drawing a line under mega-investments in frontier labs. What replaces that capital, whether from public markets once the IPOs land, from other strategics, or from a cooling venture environment, is the open question the rest of 2026 will answer.