Nvidia emerges as a major tech investor, with its stock portfolio surging tenfold to $9.9 billion.

Nvidia is accelerating its use of capital to expand its AI empire after its equity investment soared from approximately $7 billion to $9.9 billion in just one year.

On September 4, 2026, at 3:09 PM, CNBC reported that Nvidia had become one of the world's largest strategic technology investors, after its stake in the company surged more than tenfold in just one year, reaching $9.9 billion, amid a rapid use of massive capital to expand its influence and strengthen its AI ecosystem.

Company data indicates that as of July 26, the value of its investment in Nvidia stock stood at $9.9 billion, up from approximately $7 billion a year ago and just $2.2 billion two years prior.

Over the past 12 months, Nvidia has accelerated its participation in fundraising rounds from companies across the AI ​​chain, particularly pledging more than $2569 billion in 4.

This expansion has made Nvidia one of the world's largest companies with a strategic technology investment portfolio, although it still lags behind major tech companies like Alphabet and Amazon, which each report equity investments exceeding $1 billion.

Nvidia stated that these investments are aimed at increasing growth opportunities, building an ecosystem around the company's business, and strengthening its long-term competitiveness.

Funding is becoming one of Nvidia's key strategic tools, in addition to its leadership in the AI ​​chip market. In August, the company announced a partnership with a major investment firm to raise more than $5 billion in funding for the acquisition of Nvidia's graphics processing units (GPUs).

The company also stated that it is prepared to provide conditional loans of up to $1.05 billion to OpenAI's data center project in Ohio. Most recently, Nvidia announced plans to acquire Hugging Face, an AI startup, for $1.29 billion.

Companies that have received funding from Nvidia range from frontier AI labs and next-generation cloud providers like Neocloud to privately and publicly traded AI-related software and technology companies.

In addition, the surge in technology stock prices has also contributed to the rapid increase in Nvidia's portfolio value.

Ian Fogg, Director of Research at CCS Insight, believes Nvidia has a direct benefit in helping its customers and partners succeed because these companies can generate future business for Nvidia.

Therefore, acquiring equity stakes not only helps companies fund technology development, but also allows Nvidia to influence the direction of innovation to better align with its own technologies.

Nvidia dominates the market for high-performance graphics processing units, or GPUs, used in AI development and processing, resulting in exponential business growth.

Nvidia shares have risen 33% over the past 12 months, while the company's second-quarter fiscal revenue surged 106% to $9.62 billion.

However, Nvidia is trying to diversify its AI business base, with $4.87 billion of its $9.62 billion total revenue in the latest quarter coming from the Hyperscale group, which includes the world's largest cloud companies.

Fogg views funding and equity investments in companies as part of a strategy to expand its customer base and build a broader AI ecosystem, from next-generation cloud providers to emerging markets such as telecommunications, where Nvidia previously invested $1 billion in Nokia.

Frontier AI Labs is one of Nvidia's largest investors, with Nvidia's Chief Financial Officer, Colette Kress, stating that the company has invested nearly $5 billion in the group.

One of the key deals is OpenAI , where Nvidia announced in February that it would invest $3 billion in OpenAI as part of the company's $1.1 billion funding round.

Kress noted that these leading AI labs have extremely high computing power demands, but their businesses are growing faster than their balance sheets and credit capacities can support, making it impossible for these companies to build large-scale AI Factory infrastructure entirely on their own.

Nvidia therefore plays a financial role in helping to drive this investment cycle forward.

Nvidia has also invested heavily in Neocloud, a cloud service provider that purchases Nvidia GPUs before leasing the computing power to other companies. In January, Nvidia invested $2 billion in CoreWeave, and in March, Nebius announced that it had received another $2 billion in investment from Nvidia.

Naveen Chhabra, a principal analyst at Forrester, stated that direct injections of funds into companies that finance AI infrastructure, specialized cloud providers, and Foundation Models developers strengthen these companies' balance sheets and enable them to purchase tens of thousands of Nvidia GPUs.

This strategy creates a cycle where Nvidia invests in AI companies, while those companies use the funds to expand their infrastructure, which in part relies on Nvidia chips.

Nvidia is also expanding its investment in new technologies essential to AI infrastructure, pledging at least $6.5 billion since March in companies developing photonics and optical technology.

The technology uses light to transmit data and is seen as potentially more efficient than transmitting data using electrical currents. Lumentum, Coherent, and Marvell have each received $2 billion in investment from Nvidia.

Chhabra views its investments in optical and networking companies as enabling these companies to develop tools, the NVLink protocol, and design systems that work effectively with Nvidia's architecture.

The consequence is increased costs for switching to competing technologies and helps protect the competitive advantage of CUDA software systems from competitors like AMD, as well as chips developed by major cloud companies.

Some of Nvidia's investments have also generated significant returns in terms of stock value, with its $5 billion investment in Intel increasing to approximately $3 billion, while Nvidia's holdings in SpaceX were valued at $2.1 billion as of June.

Analysts believe that strategic investments in companies like Intel also help Nvidia overcome limitations in AI chip production capacity, particularly in High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and Advanced Packaging.

Establishing relationships through investment in US manufacturing facilities could give Nvidia better access to production capacity, reduce the concentration of risk in Asian chip manufacturing plants, and enhance the stability of critical component supply chains.

The expansion of its investment portfolio to $9.9 billion reflects Nvidia's leverage of its financial strength to build influence across the AI ​​ecosystem, from cloud and data center model developers to optical networks and chip manufacturing, in order to maintain the company's competitive advantage in the AI ​​era.

Reference: www.cnbc.com

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