Nvidia has been the biggest winner of the AI boom by selling the chips everyone needs. Now it's buying stakes in the companies using them.
Nvidia invested $2 billion in Nebius Group on Wednesday, an AI-focused cloud company built specifically for developers running large AI workloads.
Nebius shares jumped 15% on the news. The company recently got city approval to build a 1.2-gigawatt AI data center campus in Independence, Missouri — larger than CoreWeave's entire network of 43 facilities combined.
CEO Jensen Huang called Nebius "an AI cloud designed for the agentic era."
This isn't a one-off. Nvidia has been writing big checks at a rapid clip.
Last week, it invested $2 billion each in Lumentum and Coherent — two companies that make the fiber optic technology connecting chips inside AI data centers. On Tuesday, it made a "significant investment" in Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab.
And last month, Nvidia contributed $30 billion to OpenAI's $110 billion funding round, on top of a planned $10 billion investment in Anthropic.
The strategy is straightforward: make sure the companies spending the most on AI are spending it on Nvidia hardware.
Each investment comes with purchase commitments, technology partnerships, or early access to Nvidia's next-generation chips. It's customer development disguised as venture capital.
Huang told analysts at the Morgan Stanley Tech conference that the OpenAI and Anthropic investments are probably the last before those companies go public — a sign he knows the window to lock in these relationships is closing.
Nvidia posted $68 billion in revenue last quarter. It has the cash to play kingmaker, and right now, it's playing that role aggressively.
