Chip maker Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), which has soared to all time highs and a trillion dollar valuation on the back of AI euphoria, has its sights set on a new target: venture capital.
Nvidia has started rapidly deploying capital into a wide range of startups and publicly traded companies, positioning itself for meaningful partnerships and big bets on the future.
What’s happening:
- Nvidia has made a flurry of recent investments in private and public companies, spanning across biotech, robotics, generative AI, automotive tech and more
- Nvidia recently made waves with their investment into AI drug discovery company Recursion Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: RXRX), investing $50M to accelerate their AI models
- Coreweave, a privately held GPU cloud computing company, landed investment from Nvidia in their $221M Series B round to fuel their growth and deepen their existing hardware partnership
- More recently, Nvidia led the $30M go public financing round for Serve Robotics, a AI enabled robotics delivery company
Why it matters:
- As one of the most important publicly traded companies in the world, Nvidia’s strategic investments are widely seen as a signal of validation, as evident by Recursion Pharmaceuticals share price doubling upon the announcement of Nvidia’s capital injection
- By aligning themselves with new leading edge companies Nvidia is able to lock in high growth partners who will surely be utilizing their hardware, while simultaneously taking equity ownership
What’s next:
- Nvidia has also been growing more active with their ‘Inception’ alliance- essentially their very own accelerator- which is aimed at helping startups and venture capitalists in AI, gaming and AR/VR
- It’s also worth noting that one of Nvidia’s core offerings for startups they work with in their alliance is access to GPUs, something which has become highly valuable to AI startups in light of the difficulty around securing computing power to train AI models
- While it’s unclear how many startups are currently within Nvidia’s ecosystem, it stands to reason they plan to continue to deploy more capital into high growth companies globally
