Nvidia is one of generative AI's most active investors. Here are the deals the chipmaker is backing

Amid the AI computing boom and surging revenue, Nvidia is stepping up its investment activity.

Nvidia is on a tear.

Demand for the company’s AI chips sent its revenue soaring to $13.5B in Q2, doubling from a year earlier.

Behind the scenes, Nvidia has been investing heavily in generative AI companies.

The chipmaker’s overall deal activity has climbed dramatically in 2023.

So has the size of the deals it’s backing.

Nvidia has participated in some of the largest AI rounds of this year to companies like:

Inflection AI ($1.3B Series B)
Adept ($350M Series B)
Cohere ($270M Series C)
CoreWeave ($221M Series B)

Most recently, Nvidia backed Hugging Face’s $235M Series D round led by Salesforce Ventures.

The deal values Hugging Face, which offers open-source tools for developing AI, at $4.5B — reportedly a 100x premium on its annualized revenue.

Hugging Face’s lofty revenue multiple is another indication of the exuberance around AI and demand for development tools.

For this Hugging Face customer we recently spoke with, the cost of the platform is “a drop in the bucket” compared to the value it provides.

“We have a total of around, I think 25 enterprise accounts today…All in, it’s $50,000 a year, which is a drop in the bucket…and our R&D teams are finding it very useful. Like I say, we’re planning to launch a number of new product offerings and models in 2024 on Hugging Face. For us, it’s a long-term relationship that we have that we’re building here.” — VP, AI/ML, Fortune Global 500 Company

Read the full transcript here. And get transcripts with customers of Hugging Face, Cohere, Anthropic, OpenAI, and more here.

Running intensive AI applications requires specialized processors — a market Nvidia dominates.

Many of the startups the chipmaker has invested in are in turn using Nvidia’s chips.

Inflection AI, for example, is using its latest raise to build the “largest AI cluster in the world” with 22,000 of Nvidia’s H100 chips.

Hugging Face and Nvidia announced a collaboration in early August, giving developers using Hugging Face’s platform access to Nvidia’s AI computing platform.

Amid the AI computing boom, Nvidia is inserting itself deeper into the generative AI ecosystem.

See more on Nvidia’s growth strategy here.