Nvidia positions itself as a central bank for chip buyers

There’s a classic trick in the soda industry: give restaurants the fountain machines for cheap, then make a fortune selling them syrup forever. Nvidia appears to be running a far more expensive version of the same playbook, except the machines cost billions and the syrup is GPU compute.

The chipmaker has been pouring money into the companies that buy its hardware at a pace that makes venture capital firms look timid. In 2026 alone, Nvidia’s total equity investments in AI companies surpassed $40 billion, anchored by a massive $30 billion contribution to OpenAI’s funding round and a $2 billion stake in cloud provider CoreWeave.

The money pipeline

Let’s start with the headline number. Nvidia dropped $30 billion into OpenAI as part of a $110 billion funding round that valued the AI lab at $730 billion pre-money. To put that in perspective, $730 billion is roughly the GDP of Switzerland.

That wasn’t even the first big move. In January 2026, Nvidia invested $2 billion in CoreWeave, buying Class A shares at $87.20 per share. CoreWeave, for the uninitiated, is a cloud infrastructure company that runs massive GPU clusters, primarily Nvidia’s own chips, and rents out that compute power to AI companies. CoreWeave has plans to build over 5 GW of AI factories by 2030.