Inside Nvidia’s Billion-Dollar AI Investment Circle

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Nvidia’s reach is most visible in the elite club of billion-dollar funding rounds. It made its first direct investment in OpenAI in 2024, joined strategic rounds at Anthropic, and backed Elon Musk’s xAI — even when competitors urged investors to stay away. These investments often come with “circular” economics, where startups commit billions back into Nvidia-powered infrastructure.

Beyond foundation model labs, Nvidia has also backed companies like Cursor, Mistral AI, Reflection AI and Thinking Machines Lab, showing a willingness to support both enterprise-facing tools and frontier research. The common thread is scale: each of these startups depends on massive, sustained compute — and Nvidia intends to be the default supplier.

[kevin1]

investing in OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI is wild diversification for one chip maker