Nvidia’s AI empire: A look at its top startup investments (techcrunch.com)

Nvidia has dramatically ramped corporate investing to expand and anchor the AI ecosystem, participating in more than 50 VC deals so far in 2025 (surpassing its 2024 pace) alongside a much-more-active NVentures arm. The chipmaker — now a roughly $4.5 trillion company — has been a named backer in scores of >$100M rounds across LLM creators (OpenAI, Mistral, Cohere, Perplexity, Imbue), infrastructure and cloud providers (CoreWeave, Lambda, Nscale), robotics and autonomy firms (Figure, Wayve, Nuro, Waabi), and hardware innovators (Ayar Labs’ optical interconnects). Nvidia has even joined mega-rounds for rivals and partners alike (e.g., OpenAI, xAI), and structured multi‑billion-dollar partnerships that tie investment to deployment of Nvidia GPUs. Technically, these bets accelerate demand for Nvidia’s high-performance GPUs and shape where large-scale compute and model development occur: funding data-labeling (Scale), model training/hosting clouds, datacenter builds for projects like OpenAI’s Stargate, novel interconnects to cut AI power/latency, and domain-specific LLMs (healthcare, quantitative models). For the AI/ML community this means faster iteration on large models, deeper vertical integration of stacks (hardware → cloud → models → apps), and a concentration of influence over compute supply and standards — boosting innovation speed but also increasing Nvidia’s leverage over where and how large models are trained and deployed.