Nvidia invested around $1 billion in artificial intelligence (AI) companies in 2024.

According to a report from the FT citing corporate filings and Dealroom research, Nvidia invested in 50 startup funding rounds and corporate deals during 2024, a 15 percent increase on the $872 million the company spent across 39 funding rounds in 2023.

Nvidia
– Nvidia

Having analyzed the data, the FT said that Nvidia had primarily invested in AI companies with large compute infrastructure needs, including organizations that had bought Nvidia chips to power their workloads.

However, while Nvidia participated in more funding rounds than Amazon and Microsoft, Google outpaced all three companies during the same 12-month period, participating in approximately 120 VC rounds.

In late December 2024, Nvidia was announced as an investor in xAI’s $6bn Series C funding round, which also saw participation from AMD, Blackrock, Morgan Stanley, and Sequoia Capital, amongst others. Founded by Elon Musk, the generative AI startup launched its supercomputer last year in Memphis with up to 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs. The new funds are expected to primarily be spent on acquiring another 100,000 Nvidia GPUs.

Other companies Nvidia has invested in include OpenAI, Cohere, Mistral, Perplexity, and CoreWeave.

As the AI bubble continues to inflate, regulators across the globe have raised concerns about the dominance of some companies in the industry.

In August, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) launched two separate antitrust probes into the GPU giant, evaluating whether the company has abused its market dominance and forced companies to buy additional products to receive GPUs while penalizing those that buy rival chips.

The DOJ is also reportedly looking into the company's $700 million acquisition of Run:ai in April 2024 and its 2022 purchase of software firm Bright Computing.

Meanwhile, Nvidia’s French offices were raided in 2023 and it’s believed the French Autorité de la concurrence (Competition Authority) is considering raising anti-competition charges against the company. The UK and EU are looking into AI competition risks more broadly.

In its report, the FT cited former chair of the US Federal Trade Commission, Bill Kovacic, who said it was important for regulators to investigate if a “dominant enterprise making these big investments” would lead to “exclusivity” through the purchase of company stakes.

Nvidia rejected the notion that any funding from the company was linked to infrastructure use requirements. In a statement to DCD, a spokesperson for the company said: " Nvidia is working to grow our ecosystem, support great companies, and enhance our platform for everyone. We compete and win on merit, independent of any investments we make. Every company should be free to make independent technological choices that best suit their needs and strategies."

Nvidia reached a $3 trillion market cap in June 2024 and twice overtook Apple as the world’s most valuable company. In November 2024, the company posted total revenues of $35.1bn, up 94 percent year-over-year.