How Nvidia's Investment Juggernaut Can Jump from Big to Enormous

Move over venture capitalists-Nvidia is the heavyweight investor in artificial intelligence. And the chip maker's portfolio is only set to get bigger in the coming years.

According to Nvidia, as of July 26 it had equity investments worth $99 billion and equity investment commitments of $25 billion. But the devil is in the details, so here's a guide to Nvidia's portfolio.

Public Investments

Nvidia provides the most information about the roughly dozen listed companies in which it holds stakes-the largest being positions in fellow chip company Intel and Elon Musk's SpaceX.

The last filing Nvidia provided that gave the full detail of its public-equity positions was dated June 30 and valued its stakes in Intel, SpaceX, CoreWeave, Coherent, Nokia, Synopsys, Nebius, and Generate Biomedicines at a total of $63.44 billion.

Assuming Nvidia has maintained its stake in each company, the overall value of those positions had dropped to $46.43 billion as of early September, according to Dow Jones Market Data. That's primarily due to the fall in the value of its position in Intel, which dropped from around $30 billion to roughly $19 billion.

Nvidia doesn't detail the current value of its investments in Corning, IREN, Marvell, Lumentum, and MediaTek because they are structured as either warrants or convertible preferred stock or debt.

For Corning, Nvidia invested an initial $500 million-which gave the chip company the right to buy up to three million Corning shares at a nominal price. It also received options to purchase up to 15 million additional Corning shares at an exercise price of $180 per share over a multiyear window, which if exercised in full would mean a further $2.7 billion investment.

Nvidia also has a five-year right to purchase 30 million IREN shares at $70 per share-up to $2.1 billion-as part of a services agreement. Nvidia has invested $2 billion in each of Marvell and Lumentum in exchange for convertible preferred stock, and $3.5 billion in convertible bonds from Taiwanese chip maker MediaTek.

Private Investments

Nvidia's private investments are much harder to track. After all, it has 163 active private investments according to FactSet. But they are arguably even more important for the company's future.

As of July 26, Nvidia said its holdings in privately held companies were worth about $48 billion. It's a fair assumption Nvidia's investments in AI developer OpenAI and Anthropic make up the largest part and it could be set for major gains when they go public.

Nvidia invested $30 billion in ChatGPT-developer OpenAI at a valuation of $730 billion in February. It agreed to invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic late last year, which CNBC reported at the time put Anthropic's valuation at around $350 billion.

Anthropic is aiming for a valuation of around $2 trillion in the coming months, according to The Wall Street Journal. OpenAI is expected to aim for something comparable, although the time line is less clear.

Among Nvidia's dozens of other start-up investments, the largest was a reported $5 billion equity investment in Safe Superintelligence, co-founded by OpenAI's ?former chief scientist Ilya ?Sutskever, according to Reuters.

Nvidia has also invested $1 billion in Poolside and about $800 million in Reflection AI, according to The Wall Street Journal, and recently agreed to invest $1.5 billion in SB Energy, the data-center infrastructure company set up by OpenAI and Japan's SoftBank Group.

Once some of those private companies go public, expect Nvidia's investment portfolio to rocket well beyond $100 billion-and its influence on the AI sector to grow even more.