Few companies have leveraged the artificial intelligence boom as aggressively as Nvidia. Over the past two years, propelled by the rise of ChatGPT and the multitude of generative AI applications it inspired, Nvidia has experienced astounding growth in revenue, profitability, and market valuation. Alongside surging financial success, the semiconductor giant has significantly increased its strategic stakes in AI-driven startups, rapidly becoming one of the sector’s most prominent players in venture capital.
Data from PitchBook reveals a clear upward trajectory in Nvidia’s investment activity. In 2024 alone, Nvidia participated in funding rounds for 49 AI-focused startups, compared to 34 deals in 2023. This figure surpasses the company’s combined AI investments from the preceding four years, which totalled just 38. Notably, these numbers do not include deals done by its formal venture capital unit, NVentures. On its own, NVentures dramatically scaled up its activities as well, participating in 24 deals throughout 2024 after completing only two in 2022. In the first half of 2025, Nvidia has already engaged in seven more funding rounds.
Nvidia has openly stated that its corporate strategy in venture financing aims at supporting companies considered “game changers” and “market makers,” in an effort to continually expand and reinforce the broader AI ecosystem.
Since 2023, Nvidia has noticeably focused on larger-scale transactions, joining a series of high-profile funding rounds that each totaled over $100 million.
In October 2024, Nvidia invested for the first time in OpenAI, contributing $100 million to a massive $6.6 billion round, which brought the startup’s valuation to $157 billion. This investment was overshadowed by Thrive’s much larger $1.3 billion stake.
Several months following its backing of OpenAI, Nvidia helped finance Elon Musk’s rival company xAI, joining a $6 billion investment round. Nvidia’s involvement showcased that not all of OpenAI’s investors honored the company’s request to refrain from backing direct competitors.
Inflection AI, founded by former DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, also attracted Nvidia’s attention. However, this substantial move resulted in an unexpected outcome. After Nvidia participated as a lead investor in a $1.3 billion round in June 2023, Microsoft acquired non-exclusive rights to Inflection’s technology for $620 million, subsequently recruiting the company’s founding team and significantly reducing Inflection’s operational scope.
The UK-based company Wayve, focused on autonomous driving technologies using self-learning systems, received Nvidia’s backing in a $1.05 billion round in May 2024. Around the same period, Nvidia joined Amazon, Meta, Accel, and others in directing $1 billion toward data-labeling company Scale AI, now valued at nearly $14 billion.
Further highlighting its commitment to the infrastructure supporting large-scale AI adoption, Nvidia supported Crusoe, a provider of data centers rumored to be supplying services to giants such as Oracle and OpenAI, in a $686 million investment round. It also participated, alongside Microsoft and OpenAI, in a $675 million round for robotic startup Figure AI and in a $640 million investment for French AI model developer Mistral AI.
Nvidia’s backing boosted Lambda, a prominent AI cloud provider offering GPU-based training services, in its $480 million Series D round, valuing the startup at approximately $2.5 billion. Other significant rounds receiving Nvidia’s support included Cohere and Perplexity—each receiving $500 million—as well as coding-focused Poolside, also securing $500 million.
Highlighting its involvement in rapidly scaling businesses, Nvidia backed CoreWeave, an AI cloud computing startup initially funded at $221 million in April 2023. The company’s valuation has since soared from around $2 billion to $19 billion, as it prepares for an upcoming IPO.
Nvidia continued deepening its AI footprint by participating in additional funding rounds of smaller, yet strategically critical startups, including Together AI, Sakana AI, Waabi, Imbue, and Ayar Labs, each involving sums exceeding $100 million. These investments span diverse fields, including AI reasoning and research, autonomous trucking, cost-effective AI model training, and advanced optical infrastructure solutions.
Through such a variety of strategic investments, Nvidia has positioned itself not only as a central hardware provider for generative AI and machine learning workloads but also as a powerful influencer shaping the industry’s broader development trajectory. Building around its core technologies, Nvidia’s investment strategy clearly aims to foster an expansive network of innovative ventures poised to redefine the future of artificial intelligence.
