Jensen Huang isn’t just selling picks and shovels to AI gold miners anymore. He’s buying the mines.
Nvidia now holds a 7% stake in CoreWeave through 24.3 million shares worth approximately $3 billion, making the specialized AI cloud provider the dominant position in Nvidia’s investment portfolio. CoreWeave alone represents 86% of Nvidia’s $3.84 billion in publicly disclosed equity investments. Add in Arm Holdings, and the two companies constitute 91% of Nvidia’s bets.
This is vertical integration dressed up as financial strategy. Nvidia isn’t content to manufacture the chips that power AI. It wants to own the infrastructure that rents them out.
The CoreWeave Play: Why Nvidia Doubled Down
CoreWeave isn’t AWS with better marketing. It’s a purpose-built AI cloud company that designs data centers specifically for GPU-intensive workloads. While Amazon and Microsoft bolted AI capacity onto general-purpose infrastructure, CoreWeave built from scratch for machine learning training and inference.
At the heart of CoreWeave’s infrastructure sits Nvidia hardware: H100s, A100s, GB200 NVL72 systems, and the newly deployed Rubin platform. The company became the first cloud provider to offer Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 instances, delivering 1.44 exaFLOPS of AI compute for next-generation workloads.
The relationship runs deeper than buyer and seller. Nvidia invested $100 million in CoreWeave in April 2023, then added another $250 million just before the company’s March 2025 IPO. When institutional investors got cold feet during the roadshow, Nvidia anchored the deal at $40 per share.
Since then, CoreWeave’s stock has more than tripled, and Nvidia’s paper gains have been substantial. The stock jumped 25% in the past week alone after Huang announced Nvidia’s Rubin AI platform had entered full production. CoreWeave shares are up 40% year-to-date in 2026.
The $6.3 Billion Safety Net
Perhaps more significant than the equity stake is the backstop agreement. Under a deal first signed in 2023 but only recently disclosed, Nvidia committed to purchasing up to $6.3 billion in unsold cloud computing capacity from CoreWeave through April 2032.
This isn’t charity. It’s ecosystem management. CoreWeave needs billions in debt financing to build AI data centers. Lenders are far more willing to extend credit when Nvidia is on the hook as a buyer of last resort. The arrangement allows CoreWeave to access capital at better rates while ensuring Nvidia’s chips find their way into servers regardless of short-term demand fluctuations.
Critics have labeled this “circular financing,” suggesting Nvidia is effectively paying CoreWeave to buy its own chips to inflate demand figures. CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator pushed back forcefully on the Big Technology Podcast, calling the narrative “ridiculous.”
“I’m pretty sure that they don’t think of their investment of $300 million as the secret sauce to standing up the largest company in the world,” Intrator said, noting that CoreWeave has raised over $25 billion in total capital. The Nvidia stake, he argued, is “de minimis” compared to the company’s overall scale.
The Strategic Logic
CoreWeave fills a gap in the AI ecosystem that Nvidia can’t fill itself. Not every company can afford to buy thousands of GPUs outright and build data center capacity. CoreWeave makes that compute accessible on demand, expanding the market for Nvidia hardware and keeping more AI workloads inside Nvidia’s CUDA software ecosystem.
The numbers support the thesis. CoreWeave reported Q3 2025 revenue of $1.36 billion with revenue growing 207% year-over-year. The company’s backlog sits at a jaw-dropping $55.6 billion in contracted deals. OpenAI alone has committed up to $22.4 billion in total agreements, including a recent expansion worth up to $6.5 billion.
Other marquee customers include Microsoft, Meta, Cohere, IBM, and Mistral AI. Research firm SemiAnalysis recently ranked CoreWeave as the best AI cloud, scoring it above Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet.
The Risk Picture
Nvidia’s bet isn’t without hazard. CoreWeave remains unprofitable, posting an $863 million net loss in Q3 despite explosive revenue growth. The company has taken on substantial debt to fund expansion, and its success hinges on AI demand remaining robust.
If AI spending cools, even temporarily, CoreWeave faces real trouble. The $6.3 billion backstop provides a floor, but that’s cold comfort for a company burning cash at scale. Nvidia’s obligation to creditors is capped. CoreWeave bears the full weight of its debt burden.
The stock’s volatility reflects these concerns. After peaking near $187 in June 2025, CoreWeave fell 60% by December before recovering this month. Goldman Sachs maintains a “Neutral” rating with an $86 price target, suggesting Wall Street remains divided on the company’s valuation.
The Broader Portfolio
Beyond CoreWeave, Nvidia holds positions in five other publicly traded companies: Arm Holdings (1.1 million shares), Applied Digital (7.7 million shares), Nebius Group, Recursion Pharmaceuticals, and WeRide. But the concentration tells the story. Nvidia has reduced holdings in all of these positions while increasing only CoreWeave.
That’s high conviction. Nvidia isn’t diversifying across AI infrastructure plays. It’s placing a focused bet on the company it believes will become the AWS of the AI era.
What This Means for the AI Stack
Nvidia’s CoreWeave position signals something larger about where AI infrastructure is headed. The chip giant is no longer content to be a vendor. It wants equity stakes in the platforms deploying its technology, capturing value at every layer of the stack from silicon to cloud services.
For competitors, this creates a complicated dynamic. Nvidia supplies the essential hardware while investing in companies that compete with hyperscalers for AI workloads. The chip company’s recent strategic moves suggest it sees CoreWeave not as just another customer, but as a cornerstone of its long-term AI strategy.
Whether that bet pays off depends on whether AI demand sustains at current levels. For now, Nvidia is skating to where it believes the puck is headed. CoreWeave is quickly becoming the most important AI cloud company that most people have never heard of.
