An Overview of Its Leading Startup Investments

No firm has been more beneficiary of the revolution of artificial intelligence than Nvidia. Nvidia is known to be the core of the AI market worldwide initially due to its high-performance game processors. 

The demand for Nvidia graphics processing units GPUs has soared since the launch of ChatGPT over two years ago. Revenue, profits, and share price of the company have increased drastically, and the market capitalisation of the company has gone up to an unbelievable 4.5 trillion dollars.

Nevertheless, the control of Nvidia does not entirely depend on the sale of hardware. The company has evolved to be one of the most aggressive investors in AI startups as well. Nvidia is taking an active part in defining the next shape of AI innovation by both funding such companies, which are dependent on its technology, and ensuring that it is at the center of the ecosystem.

Investing to Dominate the Future of AI

By 2025, Nvidia had been involved in fifty venture deals, which is already the total investments made by the company in all of 2024. These are the figures given by PitchBook, not including the individual deals made by NVentures, which is the formal corporate venture capital of Nvidia, and which has likewise significantly increased its pace. NVentures has made twenty-one deals this year compared to one deal in 2022.

Nvidia also defines its mission as follows: to grow the AI ecosystem by supporting game changers and market makers. This means investing in the companies that have the highest probability of characterising the next generation of AI technology. 

Nvidia has financial engagements in the area of large language models, autonomous vehicles, data infrastructure, robotics, and even nuclear fusion.

The Billion-Dollar-Plus-Deals

Some of the biggest technological brands are some of the biggest investments that Nvidia has made.

In 2024, Nvidia invested $100 million dollars in OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, as a component of a $6.6 billion investment round. Subsequently, Nvidia declared plans to invest up to $100 billion dollars in OpenAI via a long-term collaboration to build large-scale AI infrastructure.

Nvidia also prioritised xAI, the competitor AI-based business of Elon Musk, even though OpenAI urged Nvidia not to rival the company. In 2024, Nvidia joined the 6 billion dollars round of xAI, and plans to add $2 billion dollars to further investments.

During its 1.7 bn euro Series C in Europe, Nvidia acquired French large-language-model developer Mistral AI. The valuation of the company is now around $13.5 billion dollars.

There was also another significant investment into Reflection AI, a one-year-old American startup that was viewed as a possible competitor to DeepSeek in China. Nvidia spearheaded a $2-billion-dollar venture that said Reflection AI was worth $8 billion dollars.

Thinking Machines Lab, the company of the former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati, also had the support of Nvidia. The seed round gave the company a valuation of $12 billion dollars and a $2-billion-dollar investment, thus showing that the investors believed in the new venture by Murati.

Other notable acquisitions are Inflexion AI, co-founded by Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founder of DeepMind and Figure, an AI startup that was valued at $39 bn dollars. Nvidia has also funded Wayve, a U.K.-based firm that creates self-learning autonomous vehicles and Scale AI, which provides data-labelling services to train AI models.

Investing Beyond AI Models

Nvidia has much more than large language models and generative AI businesses in the headlines, and its strategy goes way beyond that. The company has secretly funded startups in the areas of data centres, AI infrastructure, and even clean energy.

In 2025, Nvidia invested in Commonwealth Fusion, a nuclear-fusion energy startup that raised $863million dollars. This shows that Nvidia is interested in technologies which might eventually be used to compute large-scale AI.

The corporation has also sponsored Crusoe, which develops data facilities of cloud providers like Oracle, Microsoft, and OpenAI. Similarly, Nvidia invested in Lambda, a business that rents out GPU-powered servers to train AI models, and CoreWeave, another notable dealer of AI clouds that Nvidia supported before its initial public offering.

Other infrastructure-related investments are Firmus Technologies, which is establishing an energy-saving, so-called AI factory in Tasmania, and Together.AI, a cloud-infrastructure company worth $3.3 billion dollars.

Developing an AI Ally Network

The list of investments provided by Nvidia shows one evident trend: the company not only offers GPUs but also positions itself right in the businesses relying on them. The network brings with it both power and knowledge to the AI landscape of Nvidia.

An example is Perplexity, an AI search engine startup, which has received several rounds of Nvidia since 2023. The valuation of the company rose to $20 billion dollars after several months since the time from $18 billion dollars. Nvidia has also supported Cohere, a Canadian AI-based enterprise developer, and Poolside, which creates coding helpers.

The decision to invest in the project of Runway and Weka corroborates Nvidia by showing its interest in developing AI in new areas, including the creation of media and data management. Nvidia in healthcare collaborated with Hippocratic AI in a $141-million-dollar round and proceeded to build patient-facing and safe AI applications.

Even such a startup as Ayar Labs, which is working on optical interconnects to make the work of the AI systems more efficient, is featured in the list of Nvidia. Every deal strengthens the control of Nvidia over the technologies that help in AI.

An Ecosystem Control Strategy

The potency of the investment methodology created by Nvidia is that it is directly associated with the main commercial activities of the company. All subsidiaries, accelerators, or ventures to which Nvidia has provided capital always use Nvidia GPUs to train their artificial-intelligence AI workloads as well as to deploy those workloads. Therefore, a vicious cycle is created: the greater these fledgling companies grow, the more Nvidia graphics processing units GPUs they will need. 

Such a strategy gives Nvidia a competitive edge that is far greater than the short-term financial gain. It allows the company to direct the global trend of AI evolution. Enabling the infrastructure demands of other organisations, including OpenAI, underwriting autonomous vehicles startups, and investing in the up-and-coming renewable-energy projects, Nvidia is the infrastructure core of the new AI age. 

The Larger Portrait

NVIDIA’s aggressive investment in startups is a paradigmatic change in the processes of increasing the power of the conglomerates of technology. Instead of just selling hardware, the company is building a full fleet of partnership ecosystems pervasive across all sectors of the AI value chain. 

By 2025, Nvidia has the potential to be not just an ordinary semiconductor manufacturer but a key architect of the new artificial-intelligence systems. This role will include supplying the necessary tools, funding the innovators and the economic rewards of the growth in the full ecosystem. 

With AI and its impact on industries including healthcare, transportation and entertainment constantly being re-engineered, the influence of Nvidia will grow further. Having significant liquidity bases and unmatched leading control in the production of graphics cards, the company has the resources and the momentum to sustain its leadership. 

Finally, the rise of Nvidia shows that it is not only the technological ability that can make an organisation successful; it also depends on the timely investment and the choice of ideas, which can make a hardware company become the leader in the digital environment.