$30 billion went to OpenAI; the rest is spread across CoreWeave, IREN, Corning, Nebius, and about two dozen private rounds. The pattern is closer to vertical integration than venture investing, and is starting to raise the inevitable questions about circular deals.
NVIDIA has committed more than $40 billion to AI capital investments in the first four months of 2026, CNBC reported, citing public filings and corporate disclosures.
The largest item of that total is the $30 billion that the chipmaker invested in OpenAI at the end of February. The remaining more than $10 billion is spread across seven multimillion-dollar deals in publicly traded companies, plus roughly two dozen private company startup rounds.
On the public side, the revealed checks include up to $3.2 billion at Corning, the fiber optics and ceramic maker that supplies fabrics for AI data centers, and up to 2.1 billion dollars in IRENthe data center operator that is moving from Bitcoin mining to GPU computing.
Both took the form of warrants or structured commitments rather than simple shares, and the cash outflow was timed at Nvidia’s discretion. The chipmaker also increased its positions in CoreWeave and Nebius during the period.
The CoreWeave stake, worth $2 billion last January, is now valued at about $4.4 billion and represents about 28% of Nvidia’s listed stock portfolio.
The $2Millions of Nebius investments in March it is smaller in dollar terms but carries an explicit commitment to deploy five gigawatts; the new guarantee of 2.1 billion dollars against IREN It is based on similar logic.
The pattern among them is consistent: capital flows to companies that buy Nvidia GPUs at scale and re-rent them to hyperscalers and frontier model builders, a structure the industry now calls neocloud.
NVIDIA’s own strategy framework is simple. Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said on the most recent earnings conference call that the company invests where it sees a need to ensure computing power is built around its hardware.
Last fiscal year, the company invested $17.5 billion in private companies and infrastructure funds, primarily early-stage startups, according to its 10-K. The pace for 2026 already exceeds that of the previous year.
The investments themselves are mostly small compared to Nvidia’s roughly $200 billion in cash and equivalents, meaning they don’t put pressure on the balance sheet; What matters is what they indicate about how the chipmaker views its place in the AI value chain.
That place is increasingly above and below the chip itself. Investing in OpenAI is not a standalone bet; is combined with multi-year IT commitments and silicon roadmap alignment.
CoreWeave and Nebius’ positions come with capacity reservations and joint architecture agreements. Corning’s investment supports the optical interconnect supply chain that Nvidia depends on for next-generation data center structures.
Considered end-to-end, Nvidia is gaining influence over how its silicon is paid for, deployed and connected. Some analysts call this vertical integration; others call it circular financing.
Criticism of the circular agreement has gained strength in the last two quarters. NVIDIA takes a position in a company; That company then signs a long-term GPU purchasing commitment with NVIDIA; Some of the GPU revenue returning to NVIDIA could be characterized as a return on the same capital it just invested.
Oracle’s $300 billion OpenAI deal and the concentration problems it has caused is the most cited example of a broader problem; The concentration of revenue counterparties was one reason why analysts have been more cautious about Oracle even as the headline numbers grow.
The pattern with Nvidia’s smaller portfolio companies is the same, just with more counterparties.
There are reasons why the comparison is partly unfair. Nvidia’s investments are typically minority positions in companies that have many other customers; The $21B Meta Plugin with CoreWeave shows that CoreWeave’s customer base is broader than Nvidia’s.
Mistral AI, Wayve, Lambda Labs, Genesis Therapeutics, Recraft, and JetBrains are all clients or investments that have independent business logic.
The criticism applies most sharply to deals in which Nvidia is both a significant equity investor and a contractually committed customer of the same company; CoreWeave’s $6.3 billion capacity purchase deal with Nvidia is the most cited case of this.
The bigger question is what will happen to the portfolio when demand for AI computing normalizes. Most of Nvidia’s bets are financially small relative to the parent’s revenue and cash position, so a writedown event would not hurt the core business.
tThe most important risk is reputational. Each new deal that appears structurally similar to a previous one increases the perception that Nvidia is financing its own demand curve.
Both Wall Street and the SEC are beginning to question whether the disclosure regime around these deals is keeping pace with their scale.
For now, the strategy is producing the result Nvidia wants. AI infrastructure capacity is being built on Nvidia’s silicon, model vendors are securing compute they otherwise couldn’t have built independently, and the chipmaker’s data center revenue is growing accordingly.
The pace of capital commitments through 2026 suggests that Nvidia intends to continue writing the same type of check as long as the supply-demand mismatch persists.
CNBC’s tally of seven multibillion-dollar deals in the public market plus some 24 private rounds is, on its own terms, a record pace. It also positions Nvidia as the largest source of AI infrastructure funding in the market, alongside leading hyperscalers.
The role fits Jensen Huang’s narrative about being the platform for the AI era. The next question is whether this is in the best interest of auditors and regulators.
