NVIDIA tops $40bn in AI equity bets in 2026

"$30bn went to OpenAI; the rest is spread across CoreWeave, IREN, Corning, Nebius, and roughly two dozen private rounds. The pattern is closer to vertical integration than to venture investing, and is starting to draw the inevitable circular-deal questions. NVIDIA has committed more than $40 billion to AI equity investments in the first four months of 2026, CNBC reported, citing public filings and corporate disclosures."

"The single largest line in that total is the $30 billion the chipmaker put into OpenAI in late February. The remaining $10 billion-plus is spread across seven multi-billion-dollar deals in publicly traded companies, plus roughly two dozen private startup rounds. On the public side, the disclosed cheques include up to $3.2 billion in Corning, the optical-fibre and ceramics maker that supplies AI-data-centre fabric, and up to $2.1 billion in IREN, the data-centre operator that is converting from Bitcoin mining toward GPU compute."

"Both took the form of warrants or structured commitments rather than straight equity, with cash outflow timed at Nvidia's discretion. The chipmaker also added to its CoreWeave and Nebius positions during the period. The CoreWeave stake, $2 billion last January, is now valued at roughly $4.4 billion and represents about 28% of Nvidia's listed equity portfolio. The $2 bn Nebius investment in March is smaller in dollar terms but carries an explicit five-gigawatt deployment commitment; the new $2.1bn warrant on IREN sits on a similar logic."

"The pattern across these 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 a neocloud. NVIDIA's own framing of the strategy is straightforward. CFO Colette Kress said on the most recent earnings call that the company invests where it sees a need to ensure that compute capacity is being built around its hardware."

NVIDIA invested more than $40 billion in AI equity investments in the first four months of 2026, with $30 billion going to OpenAI and the remainder spread across CoreWeave, IREN, Corning, Nebius, and about two dozen private rounds. The largest public investments include up to $3.2 billion in Corning and up to $2.1 billion in IREN. Several deals used warrants or structured commitments rather than straight equity, with cash outflow timed at NVIDIA’s discretion. CoreWeave and Nebius positions were increased, and the CoreWeave stake is valued around $4.4 billion. Nebius and IREN investments include explicit deployment logic tied to GPU compute. The overall pattern resembles vertical integration through a neocloud model that supplies GPUs at scale to hyperscalers and frontier-model builders.

Read at TNW | Nvidia