Co-founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., Jensen Huang attends the 9th edition of the VivaTech trade show at the Parc des Expositions de la Porte de Versailles on June 11, 2025, in Paris.
Chesnot | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images
A conundrum I’d never have to face: After finding sudden success, what should I do with my piles of cash?
The lucky subject here is Nvidia, which transformed overnight from a graphics card manufacturer mostly obsessed over by gamers who wanted to max out their graphics settings, to a chipmaker at the center of the artificial intelligence boom.
In 2023, Nvidia was at the cusp of being valued as a trillion-dollar company. Two years later, its market capitalization is not $2 trillion, not $3 trillion, but $4.28 trillion. That’s 12 zeros after the first figure.
So — how does the company put its money to work? Rolling around in dollar bills is one of life’s greatest pleasures, but any CEO and investor worth their salt knows cash can be a drag on revenue and returns.
While Nvidia has refrained from making splashy acquisitions, it’s taking stakes in, and partnering with, other AI firms, making sure they — and the wider industry — continue orbiting around it.
On Wednesday, it announced a staggering $5 billion investment in its one-time rival Intel, which would enable collaboration between the two chip giants.
News also broke the same day that Nvidia had spent nearly $1 billion to hire the CEO of an AI startup and to license its technology, while on Tuesday the chipmaker unveiled £11 billion ($15 billion) of investment in the U.K, part of which will be used to deploy 120,000 Blackwell chips in the country.
OpenAI and other companies such as Anthropic and DeepSeek kicked off the “talk to a computer” frenzy. But “the big part of the story is the hardware,” “Steve Eisman, the investor who called the subprime crisis, said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Thursday.
That means Nvidia, if it manages to hold on its position as market leader, might have more cash to play with. What a pleasant problem to have!
— Yeo Boon Ping
What you need to know today
And finally…
Digitally generated image of purple glowing futuristic semiconductor, digital data flowing and network structure. Innovation, AI and cybersecurity concepts.
Eugene Mymrin | Moment | Getty Images
AI startup Nscale came out of nowhere and is blowing away Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang
Two years ago, Nscale was a brand-new startup in the U.K. that had yet to raise any outside funding or officially announce its existence.
Last year the London-based company came out of stealth, and in December announced that it had raised its Series A fundraising, totaling $155 million.
Now, Nscale finds itself at the center of the action in the hottest market on the planet: artificial intelligence. And it has close to $700 million in fresh capital from Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company.
— Ryan Browne, Jordan Novet
