Nvidia has significantly intensified its venture capital investments in artificial intelligence (AI) startups, with deal participation in 2025 already surpassing its total for the previous year. The chipmaker has engaged in 50 venture capital deals to date in 2025, exceeding the 48 deals recorded for all of 2024, according to data from PitchBook.
This acceleration excludes investments made by NVentures, Nvidia's formal corporate venture capital fund, which also increased its pace with 21 deals this year, compared to one in 2022. Nvidia has stated that its corporate investing strategy aims to expand the AI ecosystem by backing companies it identifies as "game changers and market makers." This surge in investment follows a period of substantial growth for Nvidia, characterized by increased revenue, profitability, and cash reserves since the introduction of generative AI services like ChatGPT.
Recent major investments highlight Nvidia's extensive reach across the AI landscape. In October 2024, Nvidia participated in OpenAI's $6.6 billion funding round with a reported $100 million check. Additionally, the company announced a strategic partnership to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI over time for AI infrastructure deployment. In December 2024, Nvidia also joined Elon Musk's xAI in a $6 billion funding round and is projected to invest up to $2 billion in xAI's planned $20 billion funding, structured to facilitate purchases of Nvidia's hardware, Bloomberg reported.
Other significant investments by Nvidia since 2023 include a third participation in French large language model developer Mistral AI's €1.7 billion (approximately $2 billion) Series C round in September, which valued the company at €11.7 billion. In October, Nvidia led a $2 billion funding round for Reflection AI, a startup focused on open-source large language models, valuing it at $8 billion. The chipmaker also backed Thinking Machines Lab, co-founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, in its $2 billion seed round in July, which valued the new AI startup at $12 billion.
Further demonstrating its diverse portfolio, Nvidia participated in a $1.05 billion round for UK-based autonomous driving startup Wayve in May 2024, with an additional $500 million investment anticipated, according to TechCrunch. In September, Nvidia was part of a Series C funding round exceeding $1 billion for humanoid robotics startup Figure AI, valuing the company at $39 billion. Other investments exceeding $100 million include data-labeling firm Scale AI, AI cloud providers Lambda and Together AI, and healthcare LLM developer Hippocratic AI, among others, underscoring Nvidia's broad engagement across various sectors of the AI industry.
