How Jensen Huang is Using Nvidia Cash to Rule the AI Economy

What’s Nvidia buying by pumping money into the AI economy through its $100 billion OpenAI investment and other deals? Influence, threat deterrence and a gusher of chip sales, that’s what.

Art by Clark Miller; Getty Images

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Even by the standards of one of the most prodigious dealmakers in tech, the past month or so has been a head-spinning one for Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.

Just in September, Nvidia agreed to buy any unused Nvidia graphics processing units that cloud provider CoreWeave doesn’t sell to other customers over the next seven years, a deal potentially costing Nvidia around $6.3 billion. It also invested $700 million in U.K. data center startup Nscale and paid more than $900 million to hire the CEO and engineers of networking startup Enfabrica and to license its technology. It bought a 4% stake in struggling chipmaker Intel for $5 billion as part of an agreement to co-develop chips with the company.