Nvidia, the world’s most valuable semiconductor company, has dramatically accelerated its push beyond chips and into venture investing, closing at least 67 AI-related startup deals in 2025, cementing its position at the center of the global artificial intelligence boom.
The scale of Nvidia’s investment activity this year already exceeds the 54 deals completed over the course of 2024, according to PitchBook data, highlighting how the company is increasingly using capital, alongside its dominant GPUs, to shape the direction of the AI industry.
The tally excludes investments made through NVentures, Nvidia’s formal venture capital arm, which has also sharply accelerated its pace, participating in around 30 deals in 2025, compared to just one in 2022.
This increase comes amid Nvidia’s extraordinary financial rise. Since the launch of ChatGPT and the rapid spread of generative AI services, Nvidia’s revenue, profitability and cash reserves have skyrocketed, propelling its market capitalization to approximately $4.6 trillion.
The company has redeployed this windfall into a sprawling network of startups spanning core models, AI infrastructure, robotics, autonomous driving, data centers, healthcare and energy.
Nvidia said its corporate investment strategy aims to expand the AI ecosystem by backing companies it sees as game changers and market creators.
In practice, this approach has put the chipmaker at the intersection of several of the industry’s biggest fundraising rounds, often in deals that also lock startups into long-term demand for Nvidia hardware.
At the top of Nvidia’s 2025 deals are multibillion-dollar negotiations involving the most influential names in the artificial intelligence sector.
In October 2024, Nvidia made its first direct investment in OpenAI, committing $100 million as part of a $6.6 billion round valuing the maker of ChatGPT at $157 billion. Although Nvidia did not participate in OpenAI’s subsequent $40 billion funding round, the company later announced a broader strategic partnership in which it could invest up to $100 billion over time to deploy massive AI infrastructure, while cautioning in its filings that there is no guarantee that such investments will ultimately be made.
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A similar pattern of circular capital flows appears in Nvidia’s biggest bets. In November 2025, the company committed up to $10 billion to Anthropic as part of a strategic round that also included a $5 billion investment from Microsoft. As part of the deal, Anthropic committed to spending about $30 billion on Microsoft Azure compute while also purchasing Nvidia’s next-generation Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems.
Nvidia also backed many of last year’s fastest-growing AI startups. He participated in Cursor’s $2.3 billion Series D round, which valued the AI coding assistant at $29.3 billion, and joined Elon Musk’s $6 billion xAI funding, with plans to invest up to $2 billion more to help the company acquire Nvidia hardware.
In Europe, Nvidia has invested for the third time in French company Mistral AI, backing its €1.7 billion Series C for a post-money valuation of around $13.5 billion.
Beyond model developers, Nvidia has allocated its capital to the infrastructure that underpins the AI boom.
It invested in Crusoe’s $1.4 billion Series E to build data center campuses in Texas and Wyoming for Oracle-leased facilities powering OpenAI workloads, and backed Nscale, which is building data centers in the UK and Norway for the same Stargate project.
Nvidia has also invested in GPU cloud providers such as CoreWeave, Together AI and Lambda, many of which lease servers built around Nvidia chips. The company’s scope extends to robotics and autonomous systems.
Nvidia participated in Figure AI’s $1 billion-plus Series C round, valuing the humanoid robotics startup at $39 billion, and has invested in Wayve, Nuro, Waabi, and Bright Machines, all of which are building AI-based systems for transportation and manufacturing.
Healthcare, energy and scientific computing also feature prominently. Nvidia has backed Hippocratic AI, which develops large language models focused on healthcare, Commonwealth Fusion Systems in nuclear fusion, and Sandbox AQ, which builds large quantitative models for complex numerical analysis. It has also invested in data labeling company Scale AI, optical interconnect startup Ayar Labs and enterprise AI platforms such as Cohere, Uniphore and Kore.ai.
Taken together, the 67 deals illustrate how Nvidia’s influence now extends far beyond GPU supply. By investing directly in startups that rely on and help drive demand for AI computing, the company has positioned itself at the center of what analysts increasingly describe as a circular AI economy, where capital, hardware sales and infrastructure spending reinforce each other.
This structure is the subject of increasing attention. Separate analysis of AI infrastructure flows suggests that by 2027, OpenAI’s annual infrastructure commitments to companies such as Oracle, Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom could exceed its projected revenues by more than three times, highlighting how continued external capital may be necessary to support current growth trajectories.
For Nvidia, however, the strategy has proven effective so far. Its venture capital investments deepen customer relationships, accelerate adoption of its latest chips and give the company early visibility into emerging AI applications. As long as demand for computing continues to rise, Nvidia’s combination of silicon and capital appears destined to remain one of the most powerful forces shaping the AI industry.
Whether this investment-driven expansion will prove sustainable for the broader ecosystem remains open, but by 2025, Nvidia has made clear its intention to be present wherever AI is built.
