Nvidia, the company that supplies many of today’s AI companies with hardware, has made significant investments in AI startups over the past year, reports Financial Times.
It is Nvidia’s venture capital division, NVentures, that is reported to have invested $827 million in various companies until October this year. This amount is ten times what NVentures invested in other companies last year, making the company one of this year’s major investors in AI startups.
Among the companies Nvidia invested in this year are Hugging Face, CoreWeave, Inflection AI, Cohere, and Mistral. The latter three companies are considered direct competitors to OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. All companies Nvidia has invested in are also reported to use Nvidia’s hardware to develop their AI solutions. Mohamed Siddeek, head of NVentures, told FT about the company’s startup investments:
Broadly, for Nvidia, the number one criteria [for making start-up investments] is relevancy. Companies that use our technology, who depend on our technology, who build their businesses on our technology . I can’t think of a situation where we’ve invested in a company that did not use Nvidia products.
However, Siddeek says that the companies Nvidia invests in will not receive any advantages when it comes to accessing the hardware Nvidia develops and sells, including the powerful GPU H100, which is highly sought after by AI developers.
