Nvidia Has Already Spent $40B Buying AI Equity This Year
Five months in. Nvidia has committed over $40 billion to equity stakes in AI companies in 2026 alone. To frame this: Nvidia did 67 venture deals in all of 2025. Two dozen rounds in just the first 5 months of 2026, and the dollar weight is now monstrous.
$30 billion of it went to OpenAI. The remaining ~$10B is spread across Corning ($3.2B), data center operator IREN ($2.1B), and a long tail of startup rounds. Wedbush analyst Matthew Bryson called it "squarely circular investment" — Nvidia funds the buyer, the buyer buys Nvidia chips, the chips show up as Nvidia revenue. Meanwhile Nvidia tells investors it expects $1 trillion in Blackwell + Rubin sales through end of 2027.
The defense from Bryson's same note: even if it's circular, the moat it builds is real. Every dollar Nvidia stakes in an OpenAI or Corning is a dollar locking in compute purchases, supply chain dependencies, software stack alignment with CUDA. Microsoft did the same with OpenAI in 2023 and the lock-in worked.
What's new in 2026 isn't the strategy, it's the scale. $40B in five months means Nvidia is now structurally a top-tier AI VC, not a strategic-corp investor with side checks. The Magnificent Seven dynamics that everyone talks about — that's now Nvidia funding half its own customer book.
techcrunch.com/2026/05/09/nvidia-has-already-committed-40b-to-equity-ai-deals-this-year. The piece reads like business news but it's really structural — when the chip vendor becomes the largest AI investor, the whole capex accounting question goes weird.
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$30 billion of it went to OpenAI. The remaining ~$10B is spread across Corning ($3.2B), data center operator IREN ($2.1B), and a long tail of startup rounds. Wedbush analyst Matthew Bryson called it "squarely circular investment" — Nvidia funds the buyer, the buyer buys Nvidia chips, the chips show up as Nvidia revenue. Meanwhile Nvidia tells investors it expects $1 trillion in Blackwell + Rubin sales through end of 2027.
The defense from Bryson's same note: even if it's circular, the moat it builds is real. Every dollar Nvidia stakes in an OpenAI or Corning is a dollar locking in compute purchases, supply chain dependencies, software stack alignment with CUDA. Microsoft did the same with OpenAI in 2023 and the lock-in worked.
What's new in 2026 isn't the strategy, it's the scale. $40B in five months means Nvidia is now structurally a top-tier AI VC, not a strategic-corp investor with side checks. The Magnificent Seven dynamics that everyone talks about — that's now Nvidia funding half its own customer book.
techcrunch.com/2026/05/09/nvidia-has-already-committed-40b-to-equity-ai-deals-this-year. The piece reads like business news but it's really structural — when the chip vendor becomes the largest AI investor, the whole capex accounting question goes weird.
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