Recently, NVIDIA's venture capital organization, NVentures, made a new investment in a French quantum computing company called Alice & Bob, focusing on fault-tolerant quantum computing.
It is a common misconception to attribute all of NVIDIA's external investments to NVentures. In fact, this venture department established in 2021, with a total of 30 investments throughout the year, is far smaller in scale compared to a single investment by the corporate development team. A recent equity investment given solely to Synopsys at the end of 2025 amounted to $2 billion, several times the total investment amount of NVentures in the past three years.
To understand how NVIDIA weaves AI ecosystem with capital, one must start with its investment system's "three-track architecture." The corporate development team is responsible for strategic large-scale investments and acquisitions ranging from tens of billions to hundreds of billions of dollars, NVentures handles early-stage, industry-wide financial investments, and NVIDIA Inception is a startup accelerator that does not provide funding but offers resource connections.
Together, these three components form the largest and fastest-paced capital deployment machine in Silicon Valley's history, and have become the primary target of scrutiny for skeptics of "recycled financing."
The True Face of NVentures: A 2-Person Team, 79 Companies, 20 Unicorns
Despite carrying the NVIDIA brand, NVentures is surprisingly small in size internally.
According to the private data firm Tracxn, as of May 2026, the entire team consists of only 2 people, has invested in 79 companies, nurtured 20 unicorns, including AI video generation platform Synthesia, clinical AI company Abridge, quantum computing company PsiQuantum, among others. In the past 12 months, the team has completed 43 new investments, with 20 transactions already made in the first 5 months of 2026, showing a significant acceleration in pace.
Leading NVentures is Mohamed "Sid" Siddeek, Vice President of the company and head of NVentures. Siddeek's resume itself reflects NVIDIA's positioning of this department.
In the late 1990s, he worked at Morgan Stanley and was involved in NVIDIA's IPO roadshow with Jen-Hsun Huang. He then moved to be in charge of TMT and telecom investments at the UAE sovereign fund Mubadala for nearly 10 years, followed by overseeing enterprise software and healthcare investments at SoftBank Vision Fund. In 2021, he returned to NVIDIA to establish NVentures.
Siddeek's own description of the investment scope is: "The real screening criteria are only two layers. The first layer is anywhere NVIDIA can touch, and the second layer is which areas are investable." He revealed in an interview with Global Corporate Venturing that this means horizontally covering almost all industries that AI can transform, such as healthcare, manufacturing, robotics, autonomous driving, quantum, etc., and vertically, from foundational tools to the application layer, all fall within NVentures' investment scope.
Three-Track Architecture: Corp Dev for Strategic Moves, NVentures for Early-Stage, Inception for Ecosystem
NVIDIA's external investment system consists of three different parts, each with a distinct role.
The first layer is the Corporate Development team, led by Vishal Bhagwati, responsible for all strategic-level large investments, joint ventures, and acquisitions.
The amount involved in this line of work is not on the same scale as NVentures. Representative deals from the second half of 2025 to the first half of 2026 include the lead investment of $30 billion in OpenAI in February 2026 (as part of about a $110 billion financing round), with a commitment to add up to $100 billion in the future; a $10 billion commitment to Anthropic in November 2025; $2 billion injected into Synopsys at the end of 2025; an additional $2 billion investment in CoreWeave at the beginning of 2026, along with a $6.3 billion cloud capacity purchase agreement; a $2 billion investment in Nebius in March 2026; and a commitment of up to $2 billion in equity to xAI.
According to CNBC, in just the first four months of 2026, AI equity investments led by the Corporate Development team exceeded $40 billion. In the 2025 fiscal year, NVIDIA invested a total of $17.5 billion in private companies and infrastructure funds.
The second layer is NVentures, led by Sid Siddeek, positioned as a traditional venture capital fund seeking financial returns.
Deals range from a few million to tens of millions of dollars, mainly investing from Seed to Series B stages. Siddeek explicitly stated to Global Venturing that NVentures "is mainly focused on early-stage investments, while the Corporate Development team is responsible for larger, more direct strategic investments." From the behavior pattern perspective, NVentures mainly follows on, acting as a lead investor in only about one-eighth of investments, more often participating in rounds led by top VCs like Accel, a16z, Sequoia, endorsed by NVIDIA.
The third layer is NVIDIA Inception, essentially a startup accelerator program. Instead of providing direct investment, NVIDIA offers startups a hardware credit line, technical support, marketing assistance, and access to venture capital (VC) connections.
In 2025, NVIDIA upgraded and launched the 'VC Alliance,' a coalition with firms like Accel, Elaia, Partech, and Sofinnova. Through this alliance, NVIDIA distributes NVIDIA DGX Cloud Lepton compute coupons to its portfolio companies, extending the reach of Inception in Europe.
There is a clear hierarchical relationship among the three entities.
Inception identifies early-stage projects and integrates them into the NVIDIA ecosystem. Those deemed investment-worthy gain visibility with NVentures and may receive early-stage checks ranging from millions to tens of millions of dollars. As a company grows to a size that can influence NVIDIA's strategic positioning (becoming a significant customer, key supplier, or potential acquisition target), it will 'graduate' to the Enterprise Growth team and enter into cooperation frameworks worth billions to hundreds of billions of dollars.
NVentures Recent Moves: Quantum, Inference Routing, AI Security
In May 2026, NVentures exhibited significant activity. In the past month alone, four investments have been publicly disclosed.
On May 22, French quantum computing company Alice & Bob announced NVentures' participation in its €100 million Series B extension round. Alice & Bob's core technology is based on a fault-tolerant quantum computing architecture using 'cat qubits' and has deep collaborations with NVIDIA's quantum-classical hybrid computing technologies such as CUDA-Q, cuQuantum, Dynamiqs, and NVQLink;
On May 26, AI model routing platform OpenRouter completed a $113 million Series B round, with NVentures joining Google CapitalG, Snowflake, among others. OpenRouter's business involves providing developers with a unified interface to access APIs from dozens of different model providers worldwide;
On May 28, AI inference infrastructure startup Tensormesh raised $20 million in seed extension funding, with NVentures participating alongside CoreWeave, AMD, and others;
On May 6, AI cybersecurity company Xbow completed a $35 million Series C extension with participation from NVentures.
From the perspective of investment targets, NVentures recently clearly leaned towards three directions: quantum computing (Alice & Bob, Quantinuum, PsiQuantum), AI biomedicine (Relation Therapeutics, Genesis Therapeutics), and AI agents with reasoning layers (OpenRouter, Tensormesh, etc).
This aligns with Siddeek's statement of "any area NVIDIA can touch," which also conveniently aligns with NVIDIA's focus on the next-generation software stack such as CUDA-Q, CUDA-X, Triton.
In terms of geography, NVentures' presence in Europe has significantly accelerated. By 2025, they completed 14 European investments, twice the number from 2024.
Three-tier Linked Investment Portfolio Landscape
If we map out the portfolio of the three-tier investment on the same map, NVIDIA's "capital radiation" to the AI ecosystem can be summarized into five main quadrants.
The foundational model layer includes OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Mistral, Cohere, Thinking Machines Lab, Reflection AI, Black Forest Labs. This layer is mainly funded by corporate development teams, with NVentures participating in smaller follow-on investments.
The cloud and infrastructure layer include CoreWeave, Nebius, Lambda, Crusoe, Nscale, Firmus Technologies. This layer is also led by corporate development teams, with individual investments often reaching billions of dollars, accompanied by long-term computational power purchase agreements.
The application and development tools layer include Cursor, Perplexity, Synthesia, Runway, Lovable, Together AI, Weka. NVentures has a higher level of involvement in this layer, with relatively smaller amounts.
The robotics and autonomous driving sector include Figure AI (latest valuation of $39 billion), Wayve (valuation of $8.6 billion). Corporate development teams and NVentures collaborate on these investments.
Quantum computing in biomedicine involves PsiQuantum, Quantinuum, Alice & Bob, and Relation Therapeutics. Led mainly by NVentures, these early investments constitute NVIDIA's hedge into the "post-GPU era" computing paradigm.
According to venture capital research firm F4 Fund, from 2025 to early 2026, in investment rounds involving NVIDIA (Corporate Development + NVentures), at least 10 companies have surpassed a $1 billion valuation, including OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Mistral, Figure AI, Cursor, Perplexity, Scale AI, Wayve, and others.
Controversy: Burry's Short Position and the Question of "Round-Trip Financing"
However, NVIDIA's extensive external investment portfolio is increasingly raising concerns. The most notable criticism comes from Michael Burry, the hedge fund manager famous for the movie "The Big Short."
According to Scion Asset Management's 13F filing for the third quarter of 2025, Burry disclosed his bearish positions on NVIDIA and Palantir as of September 30, 2025. This included purchasing put options on approximately 1 million shares of NVIDIA with a notional exposure of around $187 million at the then-current stock price and put option contracts on Palantir for 50,000 contracts (each representing 100 shares) with an actual premium outlay of about $9.2 million.
Burry posted on his X account "Cassandra Unchained," a post featuring a still from "The Big Short" with the caption "Sometimes, we can see the bubble," and subsequently shared a Bloomberg chart on NVIDIA's round-trip financing, directly criticizing NVIDIA's capital deployment model.
Burry's specific accusation is technical. In his Substack analysis, he estimated that between 2026 and 2028, cloud providers including Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and Meta will collectively underestimate depreciation by approximately $176 billion by extending the accounting depreciation period of NVIDIA GPUs, thereby artificially inflating profits for the same period. This accounting adjustment resonates with NVIDIA's equity investment in customers, allowing the buyers to have higher "book profits" to absorb larger capital expenditures, with NVIDIA directly providing funds for customers to buy NVIDIA hardware.
At the institutional level, similar suspicions are also mounting. The EU competition watchdog explicitly included the "circular spending risk" in NVIDIA's investment ecosystem in its review in March 2026.
Seaport Research estimates that for every $1 NVIDIA invests in equity, there is approximately $3.5 in downstream chip procurement revenue. In a special report on "AI Circular Transactions" released by Bloomberg in March 2026, the fund flows between NVIDIA, CoreWeave, OpenAI, Oracle, and Anthropic are depicted as a dense network.
NVIDIA holds about a 7% stake in CoreWeave. CoreWeave uses NVIDIA GPUs as collateral financing, then uses cash to purchase more GPUs from NVIDIA. NVIDIA then signs a $6.3 billion cloud capacity purchase agreement, committing to absorb CoreWeave's excess capacity until 2032. NVIDIA also commits to a maximum of $100 billion investment in OpenAI. OpenAI commits to purchasing NVIDIA hardware and building a $300 billion data center through Oracle, which in turn purchases GPUs from NVIDIA. NVIDIA invests $10 billion in Anthropic. Anthropic promises to deploy Claude on Microsoft Azure, and Azure purchases NVIDIA's Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems.
There are also arguments from the supporters.
Asset management firm Janus Henderson has described this pattern as a "benign cycle," believing that in an era of extremely scarce computing power, binding supply and demand through "equity + long-term procurement contracts" is a reasonable business arrangement.
However, Morningstar's analysis points out that NVIDIA's arrangement to "commit to purchasing excess capacity" from CoreWeave actually exposes NVIDIA itself to CoreWeave's inventory risk, serving as a constraint on short-term hardware sales impulses.
In this controversy, NVentures' position is quite delicate. Its early-stage, small-ticket, co-investment-focused, industry-diversified investment style stands in stark contrast to the enterprise development team's "circular transactions" model. The companies NVentures has invested in, such as Alice & Bob, Tensormesh, and OpenRouter, are not of a scale to form a "circularity where they are both NVIDIA customers and investment targets," and its investment behavior is more akin to the traditional CVC financial investment logic.
However, from the perspective of NVIDIA's overall investment ecosystem, has NVentures to some extent served as the "VC compliance facade" in external disclosures, making it easier for outsiders to interpret NVIDIA's investment activities as normal VC behavior rather than systematic sell-side financing, as raised implicitly by Burry and EU regulatory bodies?
NVIDIA's consistent official statement on this matter is that all investments are based on independent business judgment and are not tied to hardware sales. However, observers in the market are increasingly quoting a phrase, questioning whether, in an era of mining hardware shortage, believing that the "entanglement of equity and procurement contracts is a coincidence" is in itself a matter of trust.
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