Nvidia's Stakes in Its Own AI Customers Hit $99 Billion, Up From $7 Billion a Year Ago

Nvidia's latest quarterly filing, covering the period ended July 26, shows the chipmaker now holds $99 billion in equity investments. That's up from roughly $7 billion a year earlier and just $2.2 billion two summers ago, according to Business Insider and confirmed across the company's 10-Q disclosures.

The portfolio breaks down into three buckets, per BigGo Finance's read of the filing: $42.8 billion in marketable public securities, $47.9 billion in non-marketable private stakes, and $3.3 billion in equity-method infrastructure investments. Nvidia also disclosed another $25 billion in outstanding investment commitments not yet on the books.

Where the money went

CFO Colette Kress told analysts on the earnings call that Nvidia has invested "nearly $50 billion in the frontier AI labs" alone. The biggest single piece is a $30 billion commitment to OpenAI, part of the ChatGPT maker's $110 billion funding round announced earlier this year.

Nvidia put $2 billion into CoreWeave in January and another $2 billion into Nebius in March, both so-called "neoclouds" that buy GPUs in bulk and rent out computing capacity. It has poured at least $6.5 billion into photonics and optical-networking firms since March, including $2 billion apiece into Lumentum, Coherent, and Marvell, according to Quartz.

Older bets have also appreciated sharply. A $5 billion stake in Intel was worth $30 billion by the end of the latest quarter. Its SpaceX position, first disclosed earlier, was valued at $21 billion as of June, per CNBC's reporting cited by the International Business Times.

The spending hasn't slowed. On Thursday, Sept. 3, Nvidia said it would buy the open-source AI platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, a deal expected to close in the first half of 2027. This week it also struck a $3.5 billion convertible-bond deal with MediaTek tied to a chip-design partnership. In August, Nvidia lined up partnerships targeting more than $500 billion in outside financing for GPU purchases and pledged up to $105 billion in conditional credit backing an OpenAI data center in Ohio.

The case for it, and the case against it

Kress's argument, echoed by Nvidia in its filing, is that frontier AI labs are growing faster than their balance sheets and credit profiles can support, and are "limited by compute." Nvidia says the investments are meant to "enhance our growth opportunities, cultivate our ecosystem, and strengthen our competitive position."

Ian Fogg, research director at CCS Insight, told CNBC the strategy cuts both ways. "Nvidia has a clear interest in ensuring that its customers and partners prosper to provide future business for Nvidia. Equity investments help companies to innovate, but also give Nvidia a degree of control to encourage companies to take a Nvidia-related innovation path."

That's the polite version of the concern Michael Burry and Mark Cuban have raised more bluntly. Burry says Nvidia is "overreaching" by financing the same customers who then spend that money on Nvidia chips. Cuban has called it "truly scary" that the AI boom depends on Nvidia "funding everyone and anyone."

The worry, stated fairly: if Nvidia is writing the checks that let its customers afford its own products, that's revenue that looks organic but is partly self-funded, and if AI spending ever slows, the same equity stakes that inflated Nvidia's balance sheet could evaporate just as fast.

There's a real counterweight to that concern. CoreWeave has said the $2 billion it received from Nvidia went toward land, power, infrastructure, research, and hiring, not Nvidia chip purchases, according to Reuters as cited by the International Business Times. Not every dollar Nvidia hands out loops directly back into its own revenue line.

The numbers behind the headline number

Nvidia's underlying business is still doing the heavy lifting. The company reported $96.2 billion in revenue for the quarter ended July 26, up 106% year over year, with data center revenue climbing 117% to $89 billion, according to Epoch Times columnist Louis Navellier. Net income hit $59.7 billion for the quarter.

Earnings per share came in at $2.22, beating the analyst consensus of $2.09, a 6.2% surprise. Huang told investors growth would be even faster if not for a memory chip shortage, and Nvidia is now guiding for 70% revenue growth next year, well above the 45% analysts had penciled in.

Nvidia stock closed at $228 on Thursday, up from under $15 at the start of 2023, pushing its market cap to $5.5 trillion, the highest of any public company. In the first half of 2026 alone, Nvidia spent $42.4 billion buying equity securities, versus just $1.2 billion in the same period a year earlier, and booked $23.7 billion in net gains, mostly unrealized appreciation, per BigGo Finance's reading of the filing.

Nvidia still trails bigger tech investors. Alphabet held a $232 billion equity portfolio at the end of June, including $94 billion in SpaceX shares, according to Business Insider. Amazon also disclosed equity holdings above $100 billion, per Quartz.

No regulator has opened an inquiry into Nvidia's investment practices, and none of the source material cited here alleges any violation of securities law. The open question is a market one, not a legal one: what happens to Nvidia's $99 billion in paper gains, and to the AI spending it helped finance, if enterprise demand for compute ever cools. Micron Technology's earnings report, scheduled for Sept. 30, will be one of the next data points investors watch for a read on that demand.