The AI Podcast — Episode Summary

Episode Title: $1 Billion AI Startup Power Network Empire: Nvidia
Host: Jaden Schaefer
Date: January 7, 2026

Overview: The Rising Power of Nvidia in AI

This episode explores Nvidia’s enormous influence on the AI startup ecosystem through an unprecedented wave of venture investments. Host Jaden Schaefer breaks down the company’s strategy, their motivations, and the growing interconnectedness (“round-tripping”) between Nvidia’s funding, its hardware business, and the very foundations of the AI space. With over $67 billion invested in 2025 alone, Nvidia has helped finance—and gained stakes in—virtually every major player and infrastructure deal in AI globally, dramatically expanding its empire beyond GPUs.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Nvidia's Explosive Growth and Investment Activity

Timeline: [01:26]–[04:30]
- Nvidia’s stock and profits have skyrocketed since the advent of ChatGPT (late 2022), establishing it as the “world’s dominant supplier of high performance GPUs.”
- The company completed 67 venture deals in 2025 alone, with 57 in 2024.
- Nventures (Nvidia’s corporate venture arm) massively ramped up, from 1 to 30 deals in one year.
- Nvidia targets strategic investments to grow the broader AI ecosystem, but benefits directly: “if they put money into AI companies, all of the infrastructure required to run it is going to... be buying Nvidia GPUs and paying money back to Nvidia.” ([02:43])

2. Round-Tripping: Money In, Hardware Out

Concept: Nvidia invests in AI startups, which “turn around and give the money to Nvidia to buy GPUs for compute for AI.”
Notable Quote:

“You could basically say Nvidia is building the AI industry and the data center industry because they're funding so much of it.” ([29:55])
Analysis: This strategy sees Nvidia “finance the entire industry while their stock price goes up so they can continue financing the entire industry and their stock can keep going up.” ([36:00])

3. Breakdown of Major Nvidia-Backed Startups

Ordered by round size & significance, with select highlights:

A. OpenAI

Investment: $100M (Oct 2024) into $6.6B round; strategic partnership with $100B in infrastructure investment planned
- Nvidia didn’t appear in an earlier $40B round, but formalized a deep partnership later.
- Noteworthy: Emphasized skepticism on rumored mega-deals (“…appreciate that clarity from Nvidia, because I feel like we see a lot of these deals… that may make that not an actual $500 billion deal.” ([06:20]))

B. Anthropic

Investment: Up to $10B (Nov 2025); round also included $5B from Microsoft
- Anthropic committed to spending “tens of billions” on cloud, compute, and Nvidia hardware.
- Example of the round-tripping dynamic.

C. Cursor

Investment: In Nov 2025, part of $2.3B Series D, worth $29.3B.
- Nvidia became a shareholder after years as a customer.

D. xAI (Elon Musk’s AI company)

Investment: Details are less specific, but Nvidia involved in large rounds amid rivalry with OpenAI—expected $2B in future funding tied to hardware purchases.

E. Mistral AI

Investment: In Sep 2025, Series C of €1.7B (~$1.86B), at $13.5B valuation. Nvidia has repeatedly invested, showing international reach.

F. Reflection AI

Investment: October, $2B round, at $8B for a one-year-old open-source LLM startup; designed as a US counterweight to China’s Deep Seek.

G. Thinking Machine Labs

Investment: $2B seed round (July 2025), $12B valuation, founded by OpenAI’s former CTO Miram Ratti.
- No product released yet, but massive clout and funding.
- Quote: “She goes and decides to start a company, raises $2 billion and has a $12 billion valuation. No products launched, but Nvidia signed up…” ([17:04])

H. Inflection AI

Investment: $1.3B round (2023). Afterwards, the core team (“Acqui-hired” by Microsoft’s AI division); Nvidia likely recouped investment.

I. Crusoe

Investment: $1.4B Series E (Oct 2025), $10B valuation, building data centers for OpenAI’s Stargate project.

J. N Scale

Investment: $1.1B round + $340M in SAFE financing, building European data centers for Stargate infrastructure.

K. Wave

Investment: $1.01B+ round (2024), with future $500M planned, for self-learning AI for autonomous vehicles.

L. Figure AI

Investment: $1B Series C in Sep 2025, $39B valuation; Nvidia is a recurring investor, supporting AI-powered humanoid robots.

M. Scale AI

Investment: $1B round (2024), prior to Meta acquiring 49%. Subsequent industry backlash from OpenAI and Google due to Meta ownership.

4. Notable Patterns and Industry Trends

Strategic Global Reach: Nvidia is careful to “not just be stuck in the United States,” repeatedly investing in international companies (e.g., Mistral in France, N Scale in Europe). ([15:35])
Aggressive Early & Follow-on Funding: Nvidia gets in at multiple rounds, including following founder figures without products (see: Thinking Machine Labs).
Acqui-hiring Trends: Several well-funded companies (e.g., Inflection AI, Scale AI) saw major exits via major tech firms siphoning top teams or buying up large stakes.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On the Money Loop:

“It’s a direct: we give you money, you buy our hardware. …Nvidia is building the AI industry and the data center industry because they're funding so much of it.” ([12:38], [29:55])
On Industry Consolidation:

“Essentially they're like financing the entire industry while their stock price goes up so they can continue financing the entire industry and their stock can keep going up. It’s kind of crazy.” ([36:05])
On Due Diligence in Mega-Deals:

“I do appreciate the clarity from Nvidia calling that out, because I don’t feel like anyone else does that.” ([06:36])
On Influencer Founders:

“She goes and decides to start a company, raises $2 billion and has a $12 billion valuation. No products launched, but Nvidia signed up to help fund that.” ([17:04])

Timestamps for Major Segments

| Timestamp | Segment | |---|---| | 01:25 | Nvidia’s explosive rise & strategic investments | | 04:31 | Background on round-tripping in the Nvidia AI strategy | | 05:50–32:00 | Detailed breakdown of the AI startups and rounds backed by Nvidia | | 12:38 | “We give you money, you buy our hardware” cycle explained | | 17:04 | Thinking Machine Labs: betting on top talent sans product | | 29:55 | Nvidia’s self-reinforcing cycle in the AI economy | | 36:00 | Industry impact and summary: “Nvidia is financing the entire industry…” |

Conclusion: The Reigning Kingmaker of AI

Nvidia is now far more than a chipmaker; it is the financial and technological kingmaker for artificial intelligence worldwide. By investing at every stage and every continent, Nvidia assures its dominance not only by selling hardware, but also by owning substantial shares in every promising AI company. As Schaefer concludes, no other company is single-handedly shaping the industry on such a scale—“it’s very strategic and a good move… now they own a massive chunk of tons of the top companies in this massively growing industry.” ([36:20])

For further details or to try the models discussed:
Visit AI Box AI ($20/month, supports all the discussed models).

Transcript

A (0:00)

Welcome to the podcast. I'm your host, Jaden Schaefer. Today on the show, we are talking about Nvidia's AI investments. They have made over 67 venture deals and I think over 54 of them they made across all of 2024. Today on the show, I want to break down all of the investments that Nvidia has made, who they've invested in, how much they've invested in, what happened to those companies. And this comes as you know, there's a lot of talk about kind of this money round tripping that's going on where essentially Nvidia will give money to companies that are going to just turn around and give the money to Nvidia to buy GPUs for compute for AI. So there's a lot of interesting things going on in this story. We're going to break down all of them and I think a lot of them you may not have even realized Nvidia was involved with. So we're going to get into that. Before we do, if you want to build AI tools without knowing how to code, go check out AI Box AI. This is my own startup. If you have an idea for a tool, whether that's an newsletter generator or that's a way to automate something else you do at work, think of it as more complex GPTs, but you also can use every AI model and link them all to together. If that sounds interesting to you, go check out AI Box AI. This is my own startup. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. And we just did a massive upgrade to our builder, our AI tool builder over on the platform. So let's get into the Nvidia podcast. I think it's safe to say that no company has ridden the AI wave quite like Nvidia ever since ChatGPT first came out, which is of course over three years ago now. We've seen, you know, Nvidia seen explosive growth from all of their AI products that followed and all of the AI products that followed relying heavily on Nvidia's chips. And so of course the revenue, their profits, their cash reserves, everything surged, including their stock price, which turned them into roughly a $4.6 trillion company. So right now they are the world's dominant supplier of high performance GPUs. And they have used their financial firepower to dramatically expand their investing, especially in different AI companies and infrastructure deals. Because of course, if they put money into AI companies, all of the infrastructure required to run it is going to get, you know, they're, they're going to be buying Nvidia GPUs and paying money back to Nvidia. Just last year alone, Nvidia did 67 venture deals, and that is more than their 57 investments that they made the year before in 2024. So all of those numbers don't include all of the deals that were completed through Nvidia's former corporation venture arm, Nventures, which also ramped up significantly. So according to PitchBook, Nventures completed 30 deals last year compared to just one in 2024. Nvidia also said that they are investing strategically and focused on growing the AI ecosystem by backing startups that they believe can become true market makers. And of course we see that this is directly beneficial to them. So I want to go over a list of startups that raised rounds larger than $100 million since 2023 with Nvidia named as an investor. We'll order them from largest to smallest round sizes. And I think just all of these combined should show just how far Nvidia's influence now extends beyond just, of course, selling chips. But they are getting ownership shares in every single major AI company at this point. So the first one, of course, is OpenAI, the big company behind Chat GPT that we all use. And Nvidia's put their. They essentially first invested in them in October 2024 and they invested apparent like reportedly a hundred million dollars in their $6.6 billion round that back then valued them at $157 billion. So Nvidia didn't actually appear in OpenAI's $40 billion round that closed in March last year, but they later announced a strategic partnership that involved another hundred billion dollar in infrastructure investments. Although Nvidia said that, you know, this deal was not guaranteed to close as it was outlined. And so to take it with a grain of salt, which actually appreciate that clarity from Nvidia, because I feel like we see a lot of these deals where they're like leaked or rumored and then you, I don't know, it's kind of like the Stargate $500 billion deal with Oracle, OpenAI and SoftBank. But like there's a whole bunch of interesting things that have to happen for that deal to execute, including SoftBank being able to come up with the money and Oracle and OpenAI and like there's a bunch of craziness that goes on behind the scenes that may make that not an actual $500 billion deal. So anyways, I do appreciate the clarity from Nvidia calling that out because I don't feel like anyone else does that. Okay. The next one of course is Anthropic, who has the second biggest AI company. Basically, I guess if you're not including Google behind OpenAI, which is Claude. They have a big focus on safety, reliability and enterprise use. And that's where Anthropic and Claude are kind of like competing with OpenAI's ChatGPT. So in November last year, Nvidia made its first direct investment into Anthropic. They said that they would give them up to $10 billion as part of a strategic round, that it also included a 5 billion dollar investment from Microsoft. As part of that arrangement, Anthropic agreed to spend tens of billions of dollars on cloud, compute and Nvidia hardware. So again, it's a direct we give you money, you buy our hardware. Cursor is the most popular AI code editor out there. It helps developers write, refactor, understand code faster. And Nvidia made a first strategic investment in November as part of a $2.3 billion Series D that valued them at $29.3 billion. Nvidia's kind of doing that is kind of their official entry as a shareholder after years of just being an enterprise customer. XAI is Elon Musk's AI company, which is of course focused on building large language models and general purpose AI systems. They have Grok, which is incorporated into Tesla of the voice assistant and also incorporated into X the, or formerly Twitter, the platform where it can break down stuff. There's like a lot of controversy with it. Despite OpenAI previously encouraging some of their investors to avoid funding rivals, which of course is just ridiculous. And you can't tell Nvidia who to not fund because Nvidia is, you know, Nvidia is the market maker, it's, it's massive $4 trillion company. Despite all that, Nvidia participated in OpenAI's $6 billion round last year and they were expected to invest up to 2 billion dol more as part of OpenAI's planned $20 billion raise. They had a deal that was kind of structured in part to fund additional Nvidia hardware purchases. Again, this is making a lot of sense. Mistral AI, I don't think I realized this, but of course Mistral AI, they, so they're out of France, they have this open source and they also have a commercial large language model that's designed to compete with US and Chinese labs. It's not as good as OpenAI, if I'm speaking frankly. And by the way, every model I've mentioned so far you can go try on AI Box AI, my platform, we have a, we have a playground where you can test out model against each other and show the results side by side. But Mistral is a big company, they're doing great and they're really focusing on enterprise adoption. They're focusing on a lot of the needs of Europe. Nvidia invested for the first, for the third time when Mistral raised their 1.7 billion euro round. It was their Series C. They did that in September last year. That put them at about a $13.5 billion valuation. And Nvidia kept coming back to invest in Mistral. I think they don't want to just be stuck in the United States. They want to spread out across a lot of the AI companies around the world. Reflection AI is building an open source large language model that's kind of positioned as a lower cost alternative to a lot of the closed systems. And I think when you say lower cost, I would also argue that means like less high quality. But it's open source, which is amazing. So in October, Nvidia was one of the largest investors in their $2 billion round which valued it's only a one year old startup, but it valued them at $8 billion. And they're positioning themselves as a US counterweight to China's Deep Seek. So they're like, look, we're going to obviously Deep Seek is kind of this open sour source model out of China that's got a lot of attention, but it's not as good as OpenAI. But it's open Source. We want to do that same thing, but inside of America, the next one is Thinking Machine Labs. So this is a new AI research company. It was founded by Miriam ratty, who is OpenAI's former CTO. And Nvidia joined a long list of investors that gave them about $2 billion in a seed round they did in July last year. They were valued at $12 billion. They haven't even released a product. It's just Amira Moratti, the former OpenAI CTO. She's got enough clout, she goes and decides to start a company, raises $2 billion and has a $12 billion valuation. No products launched, but Nvidia signed up to help fund that Inflection AI. So Inflection AI, they built a conversational AI model designed to act as an emotional intelligence personal assistant. And consequently, after they released Inflection AI, they had raised a lot of money. So they actually Nvidia backed their 1.3 billion dollar round in 2023. But ever since then Inflection like basically got Acqua hired where the CEO of Inflection, Mustafa Sulaiman, got hired by Microsoft as their, you know, CEO of AI. They brought in basically the whole made like the main team. Inflection hasn't really done much since basically as a shell of its former company. I think they brought in the former CEO of Mozilla Firefox to go run it afterwards. And they, they do still have a product and they do still serve enterprise. I never hear it talked about as a company. Sadly they raised $1.3 billion two years ago. So it'll be see like if that, if anything ever happens to that company. But it like for all intents and purposes it basically got Acqui hired by Microsoft Crusoe. Oh and by the way, when all of that happened, I think all the investors did get paid back. So Nvidia would have made money back on that deal. Okay. Crusoe builds massive AI focused data centers and also energy infrastructure. And Nvidia joined their $1.4 billion Series E in October last year which gave them a $10 billion valuation as they were expanding their data center campuses for OpenAI Stargate project. So obviously they're working directly with one of these big projects N scale builds AI optimized data centers, but they do it over in Europe. Nvidia participated in their 1.1 billion dollar round. They also joined a 340 million dollar safe financing which was tied to the company's role in OpenAI Stargate infrastructure. So it's kind of interesting because OpenAI's got this big deal, but in this big Stargate program they're going to spend $500 billion. But in order to do it they need like a lot of compute and infrastructure. So they got all these infrastructure companies who go raise money to build out the infrastructure for OpenAI. I know, it's just, it's crazy the amount of money. So I mean in all, you know, to, to give Nvidia a lot of clout and like credit, they are making an insane amount of money but they are dumping it right back into the whole industry. I mean you could basically say Nvidia is building the AI industry and the data center industry because they're funding so much of it. Obviously their company is at the very top because everyone has to buy their products, but they are funding a lot of these companies. Wave develops self learning AI systems for autonomous driving that improve through real world experience. Nvidia joined their $1.01 billion round that they did in 2024, they're expected to invest another $500 million as they expand testing in the UK and California. So that should be coming up soon. Figure AI builds AI systems for humanoid robots designed to work in factories, warehouses, and other industrial settings. We've seen a lot of really cool demo videos from figure AI. Nvidia joined their $1 billion series C in September, which gave them a $39 billion valuation. And Nvidia first invested in them in 2024. So this was a follow on round scale AI. Now this is an interesting one. Scale AI gives data labeling infrastructure services which are used to train train LLMs. So you can imagine, like I've looked at kind of what scale AI does. They'll go find a whole bunch of lawyers, they'll give a whole bunch of legal stuff and have the lawyers label the data and give them kind of this customized data labeling, which you don't get anywhere else. They. They employ an insane amount of people. I want to say, I don't want to misquote the number, but they employ a lot of people and they're highly specialized, like lawyers, doctors, and they're going and labeling specific legal or medical data and explaining what it's used for. And then they go around and sell this data back to AI companies. Sometimes it's. It's contracted ahead of time. In any case, Nvidia joined their $1 billion round they did in 2024, and that was before Meta later bought 49% of the company. And they also hired Meta's skills CEO. And it's basically kind of like another one of these Aqua hires, but they only bought like half the company. Now they can basically control what happens to it. Consequently, after that happened, OpenAI and Google both said they were going to stop using Skale because they didn't want to give money to a company that, I don't know, was tied to Meta, which was a competitor at the end of the day, I mean, I don't know, I guess if there's other alternatives, that's not the end of the world. So, as you can see, Nvidia is a massive player, dumping a lot of money into the top AI companies. I kind of covered all of the deals that were over a billion dollars. Any companies that raised over a billion dollars that Nvidia was participating in, there is a lot more that raised hundreds of millions. And Nvidia has also jumped in on a ton that have raised, you know, just under a hundred million dollars. So Nvidia is participating at all levels of the industry, right? Now and I think that they're one of the major players pushing a ton of capital into these companies which turn around and give it back to them and help support their company. I believe that this is a great strategy for Nvidia because they also getting equity in all of these companies. And so Nvidia's portfolio is growing and is absolutely impressive. Essentially they're like financing the entire industry while their stock price goes up so they can continue financing the entire industry and their stock can keep going up. It's kind of crazy. A lot of people call it a bubble or cyclical or, you know, round tripping the money. But I think at the end of the day it's very strategic and a good move on Nvidia's part because at the end of the day now they own a massive chunk of tons of the top companies in this massively growing industry. Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast today. If this was interesting or entertaining or you learned anything new, make sure to leave a review on the podcast. It helps the show out a ton and also make sure to go check out AI box AI if you want to try all of the models I talked about on the show today for only $20 a month. Thanks so much for tuning in. I'll catch you in the next episode.