Nvidia announced a $3 billion investment in a Meta share sale on Tuesday. The deal adds to a long list of stakes, loans and guarantees held by the chip maker.
Some analysts now call Nvidia the central bank of the artificial intelligence boom. Some doubters on Wall Street are asking if these deals are helping to inflate an AI bubble.
“They’re essentially becoming a bank,” said Michael Cusumano, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Nvidia holds stakes in AI developers OpenAI and Anthropic. It also has a stake in Elon Musk’s xAI, which is now part of SpaceX.
The company has also invested in CoreWeave and Nebius. These “neocloud” firms rent out computing power built on Nvidia chips.
Its bets reach beyond the United States. In Europe, it backed French AI developer Mistral and British self-driving startup Wayve. In South Korea, it teamed up with SK Group to build data centers.
Nvidia has also promised financial support if customers fall short. It committed to buy up to $6.3 billion of unused computing capacity from CoreWeave if no other customer takes it.
According to US media, Nvidia also has about $36 billion in cloud backstops. The same reports point to a guarantee of up to $105 billion linked to an OpenAI data center.
Cusumano said sending profits back into infrastructure tied to Nvidia equipment was “a smart thing”. He said running its own data centers would put Nvidia in competition with its biggest customers.
Gil Luria, head of technology research at D.A. Davidson, said Nvidia finds parts of the AI industry that are not investing enough. He said it then puts money in to fill the gaps.
Chief executive Jensen Huang has defended the approach. He argued that frontier AI labs are the first startups to need tens of billions of dollars to get started.
Critics have compared the deals to the dot-com era. Back then, companies inflated their growth by investing in startups that then bought their products.
“There is nothing intrinsically wrong with Nvidia helping its clients,” said Paulo Carvão, a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. “But the closer these relationships are, the harder it is for one to assess true sustainable demand.”
Nvidia’s annual report showed that two direct customers made up 22 percent and 14 percent of its revenue in its 2026 fiscal year.
Carvão said the overlapping investments raise the risk of trouble spreading if a weaker company such as CoreWeave struggles. “If AI demand disappoints, spending cuts could hit chipmakers, data-center builders and their financiers at once,” he said.
Shares of CoreWeave, Nebius and IREN fell at least 30 percent in October. The report linked the drop to worries about tighter credit for AI projects.
Carvão estimated that demand for AI chips would keep growing for another 12 to 18 months before it begins to level off. Cusumano said he expected high demand for Nvidia chips to last three to five years.
Source: this article is based on reporting by IOL Technology. Image: IOL Technology. Written with the help of AI and published by the Tzaneen Voice Technology desk. See our Editorial Standards.
Werner Jacobs covers technology for Tzaneen Voice. Werner reports on mobile networks, data prices, internet access, smartphones, apps, AI, cybersecurity and South African tech companies. Each story explains what a new product, price change or policy means for ordinary users in South Africa.