Nvidia has spent over $27 billion on investments, acquisitions, and partnerships with companies that were, until very recently, its direct competitors. The strategy, orchestrated by CEO Jensen Huang, is turning the AI chip market from a zero-sum brawl into something closer to a solar system, with Nvidia firmly at the center.
The most recent move: a $2 billion investment in Marvell Technology, announced ahead of early July 2026. Before that, a $5 billion co-development deal with Intel. And before that, a $20 billion acquisition of AI inference chip startup Groq.
The AI factory playbook
Huang’s overarching strategy has a name: the “AI factory.” The concept is deceptively simple. Nvidia wants to control the full stack of AI infrastructure, from chips to software to networking, while partnering with companies that have mastered the specific technologies Nvidia doesn’t want to build from scratch.
The Marvell investment is a textbook example. Marvell specializes in networking silicon and photonics, the kind of connectivity plumbing that becomes critical when you’re linking thousands of GPUs together in massive data center clusters. Rather than spending years developing that expertise internally, Nvidia wrote a $2 billion check to lock Marvell into its ecosystem.
