NVIDIA has three investment channels running simultaneously, with completely different scales and divisions.

The first channel is the Corporate Development team.
Responsible for strategic investments ranging from billions to hundreds of billions of dollars. In the first four months of 2026, the AI equity investments led by this channel have exceeded $40 billion.
Representative cases include: investing $30 billion in OpenAI (with an additional reservation up to $100 billion), committing $10 billion to Anthropic, adding $2 billion to CoreWeave and signing a $6.3 billion cloud capacity procurement agreement, investing $2 billion in Nebius, injecting $2 billion into Synopsys, and up to $2 billion into xAI.
The second channel is NVentures, NVIDIA’s venture capital division.
The entire team consists of only two people, with a total of 79 companies invested in, incubating 20 unicorns, and completing 43 investments in the past 12 months.
Single investments range from a few million to tens of millions of dollars, mainly follow-on investments, with about one-eighth serving as lead investors.
Recent focus areas include quantum computing, AI biotech, and AI inference infrastructure.
The third channel is NVIDIA Inception, a startup accelerator that does not make investments but provides hardware credit lines, technical support, and VC connections.
These three form a funnel: Inception identifies early-stage projects and introduces them into the NVIDIA ecosystem; those with investment potential enter NVentures for early checks; once they grow enough to influence NVIDIA’s strategy, they are "upgraded" to the Corporate Development team, entering cooperation frameworks worth billions or even hundreds of billions of dollars.
However, this system is causing controversy, with the core issue being four characters: circular financing.
For example, NVIDIA holds about 7% of CoreWeave’s equity. After receiving NVIDIA’s investment, CoreWeave uses the funds to buy NVIDIA GPUs, then uses these GPUs as collateral to borrow more money, and then uses the borrowed money to buy more NVIDIA GPUs.
Meanwhile, NVIDIA also signed a $6.3 billion cloud capacity procurement agreement with CoreWeave, promising to absorb CoreWeave’s excess capacity until 2032. The money starts from NVIDIA, circulates, and ends up back with NVIDIA.
Similar patterns are not limited to one chain. NVIDIA promised to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI, which commits to purchasing NVIDIA hardware and building a $300 billion data center through Oracle. Oracle then procures GPUs from NVIDIA.
NVIDIA invested $10 billion in Anthropic, which deploys Claude on Microsoft Azure; Azure procures NVIDIA Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems.
According to Seaport Research, every dollar NVIDIA invests in equity corresponds to approximately $3.5 in downstream chip procurement revenue.
The EU competition regulators, in the same month, included this "circular expenditure risk" in their review scope.
Jensen Huang responded to the circular financing concerns in a Bloomberg interview, saying: "This claim is absurd. The money we invest is only a small part of the total financing these companies need."
Janus Henderson characterized this model as a "virtuous cycle," believing that in an era of scarce computing power, binding supply and demand through "equity + long-term procurement contracts" is a reasonable business arrangement.
NVIDIA’s official stance is that all investments are based on independent commercial judgment and are not tied to hardware sales.
But in an era of computing power shortages, the entanglement of equity and procurement contracts itself is a trust issue.