Nvidia’s AI empire: A look at its top startup investments

San Francisco: Nvidia is a top company in AI. It has made a lot of money since ChatGPT launched over three years ago. Its profits and stock price have gone up, making it worth $4.6 trillion. Because of this success, Nvidia has also invested a lot in startups, especially in AI.

In 2025, Nvidia participated in nearly 67 funding deals, beating the 54 deals from all of 2024. This count does not include investments from its main corporate fund, NVentures, which also made 30 deals this year compared to just one in 2022. Nvidia wants to help grow the AI world by investing in startups it thinks can change the market.

Here are some notable startups that raised over $100 million with Nvidia as an investor:

Nvidia began supporting OpenAI, which created ChatGPT, in October 2024 with a $100 million investment during a $6.6 billion funding round. It also plans to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI for future projects. However, Nvidia later mentioned that this investment might not happen as expected.

Another key investment was in Anthropic, an AI lab, where Nvidia committed up to $10 billion in a round that included a $5 billion investment from Microsoft. Anthropic agreed to spend $30 billion on cloud services from Microsoft and buy Nvidia’s systems.

Nvidia also backed the AI coding assistant Cursor in a $2.3 billion round and supported Elon Musk’s xAI with $6 billion. The company invested again in Mistral AI, which develops large language models, for a €1.7 billion funding round.

In October, Nvidia funded Reflection AI, valued at $8 billion, to compete against foreign companies in AI. It also invested in Thinking Machines Lab led by a former OpenAI expert with a $2 billion seed round.

Inflection, co-founded by DeepMind’s founder, received $1.3 billion from Nvidia but faced challenges after some founders were hired by Microsoft. Nvidia contributed to Crusoe’s $1.4 billion round, crucial for building data centers to support large AI operations.

Nvidia joined funding rounds for various other startups like Wayve, Figure AI, and Scale AI, investing millions and showing its strong presence in expanding AI technology and platforms.

This trend of investing hundreds of millions into startups shows Nvidia’s desire to influence the tech world widely, not just by selling products.