AI Radar · GAIF-AR-002Global AI Forum
Every move buys what the GPU cannot do alone
NVIDIA, read move by move: 56 disclosed moves across nine capability branches between January 2024 and September 2026, sorted by what each one buys. Written for enterprise buyers of AI infrastructure and the leaders who approve that spend.
Key facts
- NVIDIA made 56 disclosed acquisitions, licence deals, investments, financing commitments, partnerships, launches and wind-downs between January 2024 and September 2026, and financing is the largest branch with 8 of the 56 moves.
- NVIDIA held about $99 billion of equity investments on 26 July 2026, against about $7 billion a year earlier, according to its Q2 FY2027 quarterly filing as reported by CNBC.
- NVIDIA's Form 8-K of 17 August 2026 caps its conditional residual value guarantees for OpenAI's leased campus at SB Energy's PORTS-Pike site in Ohio at $105 billion, covering about 4.25 gigawatts of IT load.
- NVIDIA signed a definitive agreement on 2 September 2026 to acquire Hugging Face for about $11.9 billion plus an equity retention programme of up to about $1.0 billion, with closing expected in the first half of 2027 subject to regulatory approval.
- NVIDIA's September 2025 letter of intent to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI was never finalised, and NVIDIA instead took a $30 billion equity stake in OpenAI's funding round announced on 27 February 2026.
- Two direct customers accounted for 22 per cent and 14 per cent of NVIDIA's FY2026 revenue of $215.9 billion, according to NVIDIA's Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended 25 January 2026.
NVIDIA is no longer only selling chips to the companies that build AI. Across 56 disclosed moves between January 2024 and September 2026, it licensed, bought, financed or guaranteed its way into almost every layer around the GPU, and the largest single branch of that activity is financing its own customers.
Section one
What has NVIDIA actually done since January 2024?
NVIDIA has built a ring of ownership, licences and credit around the GPU. The Forum read every disclosed move from January 2024 to September 2026 and sorted each by the capability it buys. The result is 56 moves in nine branches, with five wind-downs, three licence-and-hire deals and two financing commitments.
The largest branch is not a technology. Financing the AI factory holds 8 of the 56 moves, more than inference, networking or models.
Section two
Where does NVIDIA's revenue now come from?
Revenue more than doubled in a year. NVIDIA reported $96.2 billion for the quarter ended 26 July 2026, up 106 per cent on the $46.7 billion of the same quarter a year earlier, and guided the quarter to October 2026 to $108.0 billion, plus or minus 2 per cent, with no Data Center compute revenue from China assumed.
Quarterly revenue doubled in twelve months
NVIDIA revenue by fiscal quarter, $ billions, Q2 FY2026 to Q2 FY2027
Hyperscale and everyone else now sit almost level. Under the reporting framework NVIDIA introduced in May 2026, Data Center revenue of $89.0 billion in Q2 FY2027 split into $48.7 billion from Hyperscale and $40.3 billion from ACIE, which covers AI clouds, industrial and enterprise customers. ACIE grew 138 per cent year over year in that quarter.
The half that is not the hyperscalers grew faster
Hyperscale against ACIE revenue, $ billions, Q1 FY2027 and Q2 FY2027
Concentration remains high. In FY2026, two direct customers accounted for 22 per cent and 14 per cent of revenue of $215.9 billion. NVIDIA does not name them, and direct customers are often system builders rather than end users.
Two direct customers made up 36 per cent of FY2026 revenue
Share of NVIDIA revenue by direct customer, FY2026, total = $215.9 billion
Section three
Which capabilities is NVIDIA buying?
Nine branches, and money leads. Financing the AI factory holds 8 moves. Fabric and light, open models and data, and physical AI and quantum hold 7 each. Structure and disclosure, the branch most analyses leave out, holds 4, and three of its moves change what investors can see.
Financing is the largest branch on the map
Disclosed NVIDIA moves per capability branch, count, January 2024 to September 2026
Most branches were financed, not bought
Capability branches against how NVIDIA entered them, January 2024 to September 2026
- Licence and hire
- A deal in which NVIDIA pays for a non-exclusive licence to a company's technology and hires its founders and engineers, while the company continues as a separate legal entity.
- Financing commitment
- A guarantee or financing arrangement NVIDIA provides for AI infrastructure that is neither an equity stake nor an operating partnership, such as a lease guarantee or a capital platform.
- Wind-down
- A move NVIDIA reversed, retired or did not complete, including business models it stepped back from and reporting lines it stopped publishing.
- ACIE
- NVIDIA's reporting sub-market for AI clouds, industrial and enterprise customers, introduced in May 2026 alongside Hyperscale within Data Center revenue.
Section four
Every disclosed move, in one ledger
The ledger lists all 56 moves on the radar. Values are in US dollars as disclosed or reported. Where NVIDIA has not confirmed a figure, the ledger says so.
| Move | Type | Date | What it buys | Value, $B |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Groq | Licence and hire | Dec 2025 | Inference processor design, founder and most staff. Price reported, not confirmed by NVIDIA. | about 20.0 |
| Groq 3 LPX | Built | Mar 2026 | Inference rack that sits beside Vera Rubin. | n/a |
| Dynamo | Built | Mar 2026 | Open-source inference serving software. | n/a |
| CentML | Acquisition | Jun 2025 | Compiler and inference optimisation. | not disclosed |
| OctoAI | Acquisition | 2024 [to confirm] | Inference serving. | [to confirm] |
| Deci | Acquisition | 2024 [to confirm] | Model optimisation. | [to confirm] |
| Enfabrica | Licence and hire | Sep 2025 | Fabric for clusters above 100,000 GPUs, CEO and team. Reported as over $0.9B. | over 0.9 |
| Coherent | Investment | Mar 2026 | Lasers for co-packaged optics, with purchase commitments. | 2.0 |
| Lumentum | Investment | Mar 2026 | Lasers and optical components. | 2.0 |
| Marvell | Investment | Mar 2026 | Silicon photonics and NVLink Fusion integration. | 2.0 |
| Corning | Investment | May 2026 | Warrants inside an arrangement worth up to $3.2B, with three new US fibre plants. | 0.5 |
| Ayar Labs | Investment | 2026 [to confirm] | Participation in a $0.5B Series E for optical input and output. | not disclosed |
| Spectrum-6 optics | Built | 2026 | Switches with co-packaged optics. | n/a |
| Intel | Investment | Sep 2025, closed Dec 2025 | Custom x86 CPUs with NVLink and x86 system-on-chips with RTX graphics. | 5.0 |
| Synopsys | Investment | Dec 2025 | GPU acceleration inside chip design software. | 2.0 |
| SK hynix | Partnership | 2026 [to confirm] | Multiyear next-generation memory partnership. | not disclosed |
| NVLink Fusion in Trainium | Partnership | Dec 2025 | NVIDIA interconnect inside AWS's own accelerators. | not disclosed |
| Vera CPU | Built | 2026 | Standalone CPU positioned for AI agents. | n/a |
| Arm stake | Wound down | 2026 [to confirm] | Arm shares sold, per NVIDIA's 13F. | nil |
| Run:ai | Acquisition | Dec 2024 | GPU orchestration on Kubernetes, closed after EU review. | about 0.7 |
| SchedMD | Acquisition | Dec 2025 | Slurm, the open-source supercomputer scheduler. | not disclosed |
| Hugging Face | Acquisition | Sep 2026, signed | Open-model platform. Closing expected H1 2027. Excludes up to $1.0B retention. | 11.9 |
| Lepton AI | Acquisition | Apr 2025 | GPU rental platform, reported at hundreds of millions. | not disclosed |
| DGX Cloud Lepton | Built | 2025 | Marketplace routing demand to partner clouds. | n/a |
| DGX Cloud, sold direct | Wound down | Sep 2025 | Enterprise cloud sales scaled back, as reported by The Information. | nil |
| Poolside | Licence and hire | Aug 2026 | Model Factory software and more than 100 engineers: $6.0B licence plus $1.0B equity, reported. | 7.0 |
| Nemotron Coalition | Partnership | Mar 2026 | Open frontier model group with Mistral, Perplexity and others. | not disclosed |
| Reflection AI | Investment | [to confirm] | Open-model developer. | [to confirm] |
| NemoClaw | Built | Mar 2026 | Enterprise-secure reference stack for the OpenClaw agent framework. | n/a |
| Gretel | Acquisition | Mar 2025 | Synthetic data. Reported above a $0.32B valuation. | not disclosed |
| Kumo AI | Acquisition | Jun 2026 | Foundation model for predictions on business data, reported above $0.4B. | over 0.4 |
| Illumex | Acquisition | Feb 2026 | Semantic layer for enterprise data. | not disclosed |
| Skild AI | Investment | 2026 [to confirm] | Co-led a $1.4B round with SoftBank for a general-purpose robot model. | not disclosed |
| Uber robotaxi | Partnership | Oct 2025 | Fleet target of 100,000 vehicles on DRIVE Hyperion. | not disclosed |
| Nokia | Investment | Oct 2025 | About 2.9 per cent stake for AI-RAN. | 1.0 |
| Cosmos 3 | Built | 2026 | Open world model for physical AI. | n/a |
| GR00T reference humanoid | Built | 2026 | Open humanoid robot reference design on Jetson Thor. | n/a |
| Four quantum stakes | Investment | 2025 to 2026 | Quantinuum, QuEra, PsiQuantum and Alice & Bob. | not disclosed |
| NVQLink | Built | [to confirm] | Interconnect linking quantum processors to GPUs. | n/a |
| OpenAI | Investment | Feb 2026 | Equity stake; OpenAI committed to 3 GW inference and 2 GW training on Vera Rubin, as reported. | 30.0 |
| Anthropic | Investment | Nov 2025 | Up to $10.0B; up to 1 GW on Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin. | up to 10.0 |
| xAI | Investment | Jan 2026 | Now held as a SpaceX stake, reported at about $21B on 30 June 2026. | over 10.0 |
| Safe Superintelligence | Investment | [to confirm] | Frontier lab stake, reported, not confirmed by NVIDIA. | 5.0 |
| OpenAI letter of intent | Wound down | Sep 2025 to Mar 2026 | Up to $100B tied to 10 GW, never finalised. | nil |
| CoreWeave | Investment | Jan 2026 | Additional shares at $87.20 on top of an existing stake. | 2.0 |
| Nscale | Investment | Sep 2025 | UK and European AI cloud capacity. | about 0.7 |
| IREN | Investment | May 2026 | Warrants and a right to invest up to $2.1B; IREN to deploy up to 5 GW of DSX designs. | up to 2.1 |
| SB Energy | Investment | Aug 2026 | Equity in the developer of OpenAI's Ohio campus. | 1.5 |
| Ohio lease guarantee | Financing | Aug 2026 | Capped, conditional residual value guarantees on about 4.25 GW. | cap 105.0 |
| Compute financing platforms | Financing | Aug 2026 | Memorandums with six asset managers to mobilise over $500B of third-party capital. | not disclosed |
| HUMAIN | Partnership | May 2025 | Saudi AI factories of up to 500 MW. | not disclosed |
| Deutsche Telekom | Partnership | Nov 2025 | One billion euro Industrial AI Cloud for German industry. | not disclosed |
| Two-platform reporting | Built | May 2026 | Data Center split into Hyperscale and ACIE, plus Edge Computing. | n/a |
| SBC inside non-GAAP | Built | May 2026 | Stock-based compensation no longer excluded from non-GAAP results. | n/a |
| Compute and networking split | Wound down | Aug 2026 [to confirm] | Not broken out in the Q2 FY2027 release. | nil |
| Gaming as its own line | Wound down | May 2026 | Folded into Edge Computing. | nil |
| Moves on the radar. Values are not summed because they mix equity, licences, warrants and a capped conditional guarantee. | 56 moves | |||
Scroll the table sideways to see every column.
Source: NVIDIA Form 10-K FY2026, Forms 8-K of 17 August and 2 September 2026, results releases Q4 FY2026 to Q2 FY2027, NVIDIA newsroom; CNBC, Fortune, Forbes, The Information, TechCrunch, Reuters and others, January 2024 to September 2026. Excludes undisclosed moves and deals still in negotiation, including reported talks with Thinking Machines Lab and Perplexity.
Section five
Why the biggest deals are not acquisitions
NVIDIA's most important capability additions arrive as licences plus hiring. Groq, Enfabrica and Poolside each left a company running independently while its technology and people moved to NVIDIA. The reported value of those three deals, about $20 billion, over $0.9 billion and $7.0 billion, exceeds every conventional acquisition in the window, including the $11.9 billion Hugging Face purchase price.
Speed is the first reason. Groq was licensed on 24 December 2025, and Groq 3 LPX was in full production by Q2 FY2027. Review is the second. Bernstein's Stacy Rasgon wrote in December 2025 that the Groq structure may keep the fiction of competition alive, and the roughly $0.7 billion Run:ai deal had already drawn a European Commission review under Article 22 despite falling below EU thresholds.
Finding
For any buyer tracking a vendor's capability, the largest additions no longer show up as acquisitions. Read the licences and the hiring, not only the deal list.
Section six
How much of its own demand does NVIDIA finance?
A growing share, and the exact share is not disclosed. NVIDIA holds equity in OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, CoreWeave, Nscale and IREN, and each buys NVIDIA compute. In the first half of FY2027, to 26 July 2026, NVIDIA spent $42.4 billion buying equity securities and recorded $23.7 billion of gains on them.
$99B
Equity investments held by NVIDIA
About $99 billion on 26 July 2026, against about $7 billion a year earlier, plus about $25 billion of further equity commitments. Source: NVIDIA Q2 FY2027 Form 10-Q, as reported by CNBC, 4 September 2026.
The gains move both ways. NVIDIA's listed stakes were worth $63.4 billion on 30 June 2026 and about $46.4 billion by early September 2026, mostly because the Intel position fell from about $30 billion to about $19 billion.
Listed stakes lost about a quarter of their value in ten weeks
30 June 2026 to early September 2026, market value, $ billions
Section seven
What the $105 billion Ohio guarantee is, and is not
It is a cap on a conditional guarantee, not cash invested. NVIDIA's Form 8-K of 17 August 2026 describes residual value guarantees given to SB Energy on leases for about 4.25 gigawatts of IT load that OpenAI will occupy at the PORTS-Pike campus in Pike County, Ohio, under a 20-year lease. NVIDIA's aggregate obligation is capped at $105 billion and phases in from 2028.
In the base case, where OpenAI pays its rent, NVIDIA pays nothing. NVIDIA also holds an option to support about 3.75 further gigawatts, will be the exclusive AI compute provider on the site, and is investing $1.5 billion of cash in SB Energy. Jensen Huang rejected the circular-financing reading on X in August 2026, saying OpenAI will pay the lease.
$105B
Cap on NVIDIA's Ohio lease guarantees
Conditional residual value guarantees on about 4.25 gigawatts for OpenAI at SB Energy's PORTS-Pike campus, phasing in from 2028. Source: NVIDIA Form 8-K, 17 August 2026, Item 1.01.
Prudent use of a strong balance sheet
NVIDIA pays only if the tenant defaults and SB Energy recovers less than the guaranteed values. The guarantee makes a campus bankable that would otherwise take longer to finance, and it secures NVIDIA as the exclusive supplier.
Concentrated tail risk
Up to $105 billion of credit support is tied to one tenant, with an option to extend coverage by about 88 per cent in capacity terms. The same filing period saw a separate plan for over $500 billion of third-party financing. Contingent exposure is now part of NVIDIA's growth model.
Press reports in July 2026 described a backstop of $250 billion. The 17 August 2026 filing describes a smaller, capped and conditional instrument. The Forum uses the filed figure.
Section eight
When did NVIDIA change course?
- September 2025A cloud stepped back, a letter of intent signed
The Information reported NVIDIA scaling back DGX Cloud sales to enterprises. NVIDIA announced the Intel stake, the Enfabrica licence and hire, and a letter of intent to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI.
- November 2025Anthropic joins the balance sheet
NVIDIA committed to invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic, which committed to up to 1 gigawatt of NVIDIA systems. Source: Microsoft, NVIDIA and Anthropic release, 18 November 2025.
- December 2025Groq and Slurm
NVIDIA licensed Groq's technology and hired its leadership for a reported $20 billion, acquired SchedMD, and closed the $5 billion Intel stake.
- February 2026The $100 billion becomes $30 billion
NVIDIA took a $30 billion stake in OpenAI's round announced on 27 February 2026, replacing the unsigned letter of intent. Source: CNBC, 4 March 2026.
- March 2026GTC and the optics buying
NVIDIA launched Groq 3 LPX, NemoClaw and the Nemotron Coalition at GTC on 16 March 2026, and invested $2 billion each in Coherent, Lumentum and Marvell during the month.
- May 2026The reporting reset
With Q1 FY2027 results, NVIDIA replaced its five market platforms with Data Center and Edge Computing, and split Data Center into Hyperscale and ACIE. Source: NVIDIA Q1 FY2027 results release.
- August 2026Financing becomes strategy
NVIDIA announced financing platforms with six asset managers on 10 August, filed the $105 billion Ohio guarantee on 17 August, and licensed Poolside for a reported $6 billion.
- September 2026Hugging Face signed
NVIDIA agreed to acquire Hugging Face on 2 September 2026, with closing expected in the first half of 2027. Source: NVIDIA Form 8-K, 2 September 2026.
Section nine
What NVIDIA stopped reporting
Four moves on the radar are about disclosure, and two remove a view investors used to have. Gaming lost its own line in May 2026, and compute and networking were no longer broken out in the Q2 FY2027 release [to confirm against the Q2 FY2027 CFO commentary]. Under the old framework, NVIDIA reported Q1 FY2027 networking revenue of $14.8 billion, up 199 per cent year over year, against compute revenue of $60.4 billion, up 77 per cent.
Two changes add information. The Hyperscale and ACIE split is more useful than what it replaced, and moving stock-based compensation inside non-GAAP results from Q1 FY2027 is the more conservative choice.
Finding
NVIDIA does not disclose how much of its ACIE revenue comes from companies it has financed or guaranteed, and that is the single most important number the map cannot supply.
What this research does not establish
- The share of NVIDIA's Data Center revenue that comes from companies NVIDIA has financed, guaranteed or holds equity in. NVIDIA does not report it.
- The terms of several deals NVIDIA has not confirmed, including the Groq price, the Poolside terms, the Kumo price, and the Safe Superintelligence and Reflection AI amounts.
- Whether the Hugging Face acquisition will close on the stated terms, since it remains subject to regulatory approval expected in the first half of 2027.
- Whether the six compute financing memorandums announced on 10 August 2026 will become definitive agreements, or at what scale.
Cite this as
Global AI Forum, Every move buys what the GPU cannot do alone, September 2026. GAIF-AR-002 v1.0. gaiforum.comSources
- Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended 25 January 2026, NVIDIA Corporation, 25 February 2026, direct customers and China disclosures.
- Financial Results for Second Quarter Fiscal 2027, NVIDIA Corporation, 26 August 2026, summary and highlights.
- Financial Results for First Quarter Fiscal 2027 and CFO Commentary, NVIDIA Corporation, May 2026, reporting framework.
- Financial Results for Fourth Quarter and Fiscal 2026, NVIDIA Corporation, 25 February 2026.
- Current Report on Form 8-K, NVIDIA Corporation, 17 August 2026, residual value guaranties with SB Energy.
- Current Report on Form 8-K, NVIDIA Corporation, 2 September 2026, Item 8.01, Hugging Face agreement.
- NVIDIA Partners With Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR, NVIDIA newsroom, 10 August 2026.
- Microsoft, NVIDIA and Anthropic announce strategic partnerships, Microsoft and NVIDIA newsrooms, 18 November 2025.
- NVIDIA Acquires Open-Source Workload Management Provider SchedMD, NVIDIA blog, 15 December 2025.
- Nvidia's investments grow to $99 billion, CNBC, 4 September 2026.
- Nvidia buying AI chip startup Groq's assets for about $20 billion, CNBC, 24 December 2025; and analyst commentary, CNBC, 26 December 2025.
- Nvidia CEO Huang says $30 billion OpenAI investment might be the last, CNBC, 4 March 2026.
- Nvidia backing $105 billion in financing for OpenAI data center in Ohio, CNBC, 17 August 2026; Axios, 17 August 2026.
- Nvidia spends $6.5B on photonics, The Next Web, June 2026; Nvidia to invest up to $3.2 billion in Corning, CNBC, 6 May 2026.
- Exclusive: Nvidia snaps up Kumo AI, Fortune, 3 June 2026; Nvidia Pays Poolside $6 Billion, Forbes, 24 August 2026.
- How Nvidia's investment juggernaut can jump from big to enormous, Dow Jones via TradingView, September 2026.
- Nvidia steps back from DGX Cloud, Tom's Hardware, 12 September 2025, citing The Information.
Global AI Forum · GAIF-AR-002 · v1.0 Research current as of 15 September 2026 gaiforum.com