Recently, data from PitchBook, a well-known investment tracking agency, shows that Nvidia has increased its venture capital efforts in 2024, participating in 49 rounds of financing for AI-related companies, 34 rounds in 2023, and a total of 38 rounds in the four years before 2023. The fields covered include large language models, multimodal large models, autonomous driving, robotics, computing power, quantum technology, etc.

NVIDIA's AI investment territory is expanding at an accelerated pace!

NVIDIA's "big gamble": 5 companies with huge investment

Nvidia not only dominates the GPU market, but also makes several heavy investments in the field of AI. Here are five companies that have won NVIDIA's favor, each with a single funding amount of more than $1 billion, covering a variety of hot areas from large models to autonomous driving.

1. OpenAI: Nvidia makes its first move, betting on the future

When: October 2024

Financing amount: US$6.6 billion (approximately RMB47.319 billion)

Nvidia's investment: US$100 million (about 717 million yuan)

Valuation: US$157 billion (about 1,125.612 billion yuan)

This is Nvidia's first investment in OpenAI, and the company known for its GPT series is undoubtedly the star of the AI world. The addition of Nvidia not only provides financial support for OpenAI, but also shows that it is highly optimistic about the company's future.

2. xAI: Musk's new favorite, Nvidia continues to increase its weight

When: December 2024

Financing amount: US$6 billion (approximately RMB43.017 billion)

Background: xAI was founded by Elon Musk and focuses on developing AI technology. The funding shows that not all investors have followed OpenAI's request to no longer support its competitors. Even in the highly competitive field of AI, NVIDIA is still willing to support multiple potential players, especially those projects led by industry leaders.

3. Inflection: Google's founder of DeepMind created a new idea, but suffered a brain drain

When: June 2023

Financing amount: US$1.3 billion (approximately RMB9.32 billion)

Background: Inflection by Mustafa Mustafa, founder of Google DeepMind Suleyman was founded in 2022. However, less than a year later, Microsoft poached the two founders and spent $620 million (about 4.445 billion yuan) to license Inflection's technology.

Despite this, Inflection received a significant investment from Nvidia, becoming one of its first major AI investments. However, this brain drain has left the company's future somewhat uncertain.

4. Wayve: A rising star in autonomous driving

When: May this year

Financing amount: US$1.05 billion (approximately RMB7.529 billion)

Background: Wayve was founded in 2017 and focuses on the research and development of autonomous driving technology. They tested vehicles in the UK and the San Francisco Bay Area, demonstrating strong technical research and development capabilities.

NVIDIA's investment further strengthens Wayve's position in the field of autonomous driving and paves the way for future commercialization.

5. Scale AI: The leader in data annotation services

When: May 2024

Financing amount: US$1 billion (approximately RMB7.17 billion)

Background: Scale Founded in 2016, AI provides data labeling services for enterprises to train AI models. This round of funding enables Scale The valuation of AI is close to 14 billion US dollars (about 100.373 billion yuan).

Scale AI's success lies not only in its technical prowess, but also in its ability to help other companies train AI models faster and more efficiently, making it an integral part of the AI ecosystem.

Many won hundreds of millions of dollars

Won hundreds of millions of dollars in financing, including the top figure of humanoid robots AI, CoreWeave, the "son of NVIDIA", and Mistral, a French large language model developer that was invested by NVIDIA AI。

1. Crusoe: The tech company behind the $500 billion mega-project

When: November 2024

Financing amount: US$686 million (approximately RMB4.928 billion)

Lead Investor: Founders Fund (Peter Thiel's top venture capital)

Nvidia also followed

The company, called Crusoe, was founded in 2018 and recently received a significant amount of funding. But the most eye-catching thing about it is that it was chosen as the sole developer and operator of the Stargate program (yes, it sounds like a science fiction movie) with a total investment of up to $500 billion!

Although there are not many details, it is conceivable that there are likely to be cutting-edge projects such as hyperscale computing, AI infrastructure, or green energy computing centers behind this.

2. Figure AI: The top star in the humanoid robot world

When: February 2024

Financing: US$675 million (approximately RMB4.849 billion)

Investor lineup: Nvidia, OpenAI Startup Fund, Microsoft are here

Figure AI is a startup focused on humanoid robots that has reached a valuation of $2.6 billion in just two years of existence. They have released the first demo of a robot equipped with a large OpenAI model, which has attracted widespread attention.

Interestingly, this year, Figure announced the termination of its partnership agreement with OpenAI, which may mean that it is going its own way. Will it become a fierce rival of Musk's Optimus (Optimus Prime) in the future? We'll see!

3. Mistral AI: French large-scale model upstart, Nvidia has invested in two rounds in a row

When: June 2024

Financing amount: US$640 million (approximately RMB4.588 billion)

Valuation: US$6 billion (about 43 billion yuan)

The Paris-based AI company is called Mistral AI, founded by former researchers at DeepMind and Meta, is the main open-source large language model route to challenge a number of closed-source manufacturers in the United States.

This is Nvidia's second investment in it, illustrating its growing importance in the European and global AI landscape. After all, whoever masters the big model will have the opportunity to define the next generation of AI ecosystems.

4. Cohere: Enterprise-level large-scale model service provider, an old friend of NVIDIA

When: June 2024

Financing amount: US$500 million (approximately RMB3.585 billion)

Background: Founded in 2019, Cohere focuses on providing customized large language model services to enterprise customers.

Nvidia has already invested in it once as early as 2023, and this time it continues to increase its weight, indicating that it has gained a firm foothold in the B-end AI market. If you're a company that wants to use AI for customer service, content generation, and data analysis, then Cohere could be one of your important partners.

5. Perplexity: The dark horse of the AI search engine, Nvidia followed all the way

When: The first investment will be made in November 2023, and NVIDIA will participate in every round after that

Latest funding round: $500 million in December 2024

Valuation: US$9 billion (about 64.5 billion yuan)

Perplexity is a company that develops a conversational search engine based on large language models, with the goal of disrupting Google's traditional search model.

|Nvidia quietly became an "AI venture capital boss"

As soon as ChatGPT was launched at the end of 2022, the whole world seemed to be ignited by the word "AI". Since then, the battlefield of generative AI has become more and more lively, with more and more players, and Nvidia is arguably one of the biggest beneficiaries of this AI revolution.

Its revenue, profits, and cash flow have all "taken off", which can be described in one sentence: not only are the chips selling well, but the wallet is also bulging.

What do you do when you get rich? Nvidia starts investing heavily in AI startups! But what you may not know is that instead of keeping all its money in the bank, Nvidia has begun to invest massively in various AI startups — especially those it feels will be a "game-changer" in the future.

There is a clear strategic goal behind this: to further expand and consolidate the impact of the AI ecosystem by investing in promising AI startups. In other words, Nvidia doesn't just want to make money by selling chips, it also wants these AI companies to grow, which in turn pushes more people to use its GPUs, forming a positive cycle.

What are the characteristics of the AI companies that NVIDIA invests in?

Judging from its investment actions in recent years, there are several very obvious features:

Geographical distribution: not only in the United States, but also in the world, such as Mistral in France AI, Wayve in the UK, etc.; The establishment span is large: there are rookies who have just been established for a long time (such as Perplexity), and there are also established startups that have already become well-known (such as Cohere); There are many fields: from large models, AI search, and data annotation to robotics and autonomous driving, almost all key AI tracks are covered. Nvidia's investment strategy is like casting a net to catch fish – it throws itself wherever it has the opportunity.

For investors, NVIDIA's investment actions are actually a very good observation window:

Who it voted for shows that this company is most likely technologically leading and scarce in the market;

The areas in which it continues to increase often mean that this direction is on the eve of an outbreak;

The range of industries it covers can also help us determine which AI tracks are being accelerated.