Two New Deals. Same Week.

Nvidia struck two major deals this week. According to CNBC, Nvidia secured the right to invest up to $3.2 billion in Corning — the 175-year-old glass maker — and a separate agreement to invest up to $2.1 billion in IREN, a data center operator. Both stocks jumped on the announcements.

These aren't small side bets. These are strategic positions in companies that supply the physical infrastructure running Nvidia's GPUs.

The Scoreboard So Far in 2026

Nvidia has committed over $40 billion in equity investments in the first five months of 2026 alone, according to CNBC. That figure exceeds the annual investment volumes of many sovereign wealth funds, according to intellectia.ai.

The portfolio includes at least seven multibillion-dollar investments in publicly traded companies this year, plus roughly two dozen private company deals, per intellectia.ai.

The anchor position is a $30 billion commitment to OpenAI — three-quarters of the entire 2026 investment budget in a single bet on the company Nvidia has partnered with since the early ChatGPT days.

The $5 billion bet on Intel is now worth over $25 billion, according to CNBC. That's a roughly 400% gain in a matter of months.

What Jensen Huang Is Actually Building

CEO Jensen Huang has a specific playbook: finance the entire AI supply chain so it runs on Nvidia hardware.

Optical fiber. Data centers. AI model developers. Cloud operators. Nvidia is inserting itself — financially — into every layer of the stack. The goal is to make Nvidia essential to operating an AI infrastructure business.

Wedbush Securities analyst Matthew Bryson called it the "circular investment theme" in a note cited by CNBC.

The Criticism Mainstream Coverage Is Soft-Pedaling

Most outlets downplay this dynamic: Nvidia is backing companies that purchase its chips, and in some cases leasing compute capacity back to them.

That's circular financing. Company A gets Nvidia investment money. Company A buys Nvidia chips with that money. Company A leases compute back to Nvidia's other portfolio companies. Everyone's revenue increases. Everyone's valuation rises. The cycle repeats.

CNBC notes critics have directly compared this to the vendor financing that helped inflate the dot-com bubble. That's a structural risk embedded in what appears to be sophisticated dealmaking.

Intellectia.ai flags the regulatory dimension — if the circular nature of this funding attracts antitrust scrutiny, the entire ecosystem Nvidia has built could face forced unwinding. Mainstream coverage hasn't explored that scenario in depth.

Jim Cramer Wants Nvidia to Be More Like Apple

On the retail investor side, CNBC's Jim Cramer argued this weekend that Nvidia should "take a page out of Apple's playbook" and do more for ordinary shareholders — referencing Apple's record close near $309 per share, up roughly 13.5% year to date.

Cramer's point: Nvidia generates extraordinary wealth but regular investors feel left behind compared to Apple's steady, shareholder-friendly capital return model.

Apple buys back stock. Apple pays dividends. Nvidia is plowing $40 billion into external bets. That's a choice — and shareholders deserve to understand the tradeoff.

The Number That Actually Matters

Nvidia generated $97 billion in free cash flow last fiscal year, according to both CNBC and intellectia.ai. The company sits on generational cash flow. Investing $40 billion of it is defensible on its face.

But a critical question: What happens if AI infrastructure spending hits a wall?

If hyperscalers pull back on data center buildout — and there are early signs Microsoft and others are doing exactly that — then Nvidia's portfolio companies face pressure. Their chip demand drops. Their valuations decline. Nvidia's investment returns evaporate. And the $5.2 trillion market cap faces a stress test few are currently factoring in.

What This Means for You

If you own NVDA, you're not just owning a chipmaker anymore. You're owning a position in a company that has tied its financial health to the continued explosive growth of every company it has ever invested in.

Circular financing schemes don't announce themselves before they unwind. They look sound right up until they don't.

Nvidia may be the most important company in the world right now. That doesn't shield it from the laws of financial gravity.