As a $4.3 trillion company, Nvidia has the financial resources to invest in a lot of startups. Lately, it’s had the motivation to do so too.

So far this year, the chip designer and most highly valued U.S. public company has made at least 42 investments in private companies, either directly or through its NVentures venture arm, per Crunchbase data. That’s up slightly from the year-ago period, which was already unusually busy.

As illustrated below, Nvidia wasn’t always such a prolific startup investor. The chip giant began picking up the pace in 2023, and so far it hasn’t looked back.

A penchant for ‘hard tech’

Nvidia’s startup investments this year cover a diverse array of businesses. One thing they share in common, however, is a focus on “hard tech” — solving entrenched, complicated problems with advanced technologies and teams with deep expertise.

In other words, these aren’t mom-and-pop startups anyone could dream up at the kitchen table.

For proof, look at one of the largest rounds that Nvidia backed this year: An $863 million Series B for Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which hopes to be first in the world to commercialize fusion power.

Or consider Quantinuum, a quantum computing startup that landed $600 million last month in an NVentures-led round. And don’t leave out Mistral AI, the French GenAI startup that just closed the largest round to date for a European AI company.

The NVentures mission statement is to invest in companies that are “solving complex problems” and it’s not limited by sector. The portfolio today spans from robotics to biotech to AI video generation. Nvidia is also active in working with very nascent companies, often through its Nvidia Inception program for AI startups.

Typically, a nonlead role

Although Nvidia has sometimes served as lead investor, typically it does not. This held true in 2025, with the chip giant and its venture arm disclosing a lead role in only five rounds — or roughly 1 in 8 they backed.

Of those, several were rather large. The second-biggest after Quantinuum was a $300 million Series D for AI21 Labs, an Israeli enterprise AI startup. Nvidia also co-led a $135 million Series B for Skild AI, which develops AI software to power robots.

Investing with a broad brush

If we were to generalize Nvidia’s strategy based on its known funding rounds for the past few years, the driving interest appears to be to have a stake in companies likely to play a transformative role in the future of AI technology.

Nvidia has a stake in several of the most-valuable AI companies, including OpenAI, Databricks, xAI and ScaleAI. It also has a number of  power generation-related investments sprinkled in, indicating ongoing concern and interest in how we are going to feed all those power-hungry AI bots.

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Illustration: Dom Guzman