🤚 The Open-Palm Ledger

Nvidia has committed over $40 billion in equity investments to AI companies in the first five months of 2026 alone, effectively transforming itself from a chipmaker into the world’s most expensive venture capital firm that also happens to manufacture GPUs.

The crown jewel of this spending spree is a $30 billion stake in OpenAI, which accounts for roughly three-quarters of the total. But Jensen Huang’s checkbook didn’t stop there. Nvidia has also signed deals with:

• Corning Inc. — up to $3.2 billion, because apparently the company that makes your phone screen glass also makes the fiber optics AI data centers desperately need
• IREN Ltd. — up to $2.1 billion in the data center operator, because someone has to keep the lights on in buildings full of H100s
• Roughly two dozen private startup rounds, according to FactSet, because when you have this much money, saying no to a pitch deck feels rude

In total, Nvidia has signed at least seven multibillion-dollar deals with publicly traded companies this year. Goldman Sachs responded by raising Nvidia’s 2026–2027 revenue and earnings estimates by approximately 12%, forecasting earnings running 14–34% above Wall Street consensus ahead of the May 20 earnings report. Altimeter Capital CEO Brad Gerstner suggested Nvidia could become the world’s first $10 trillion company.

👐 The Two-Handed Investor Ouroboros

Here’s the part where you squint at the spreadsheet and ask a question that should have been asked several billion dollars ago: Nvidia is investing in its own customers.

This is not a subtle observation. Wedbush Securities analyst Matthew Bryson characterized the strategy as falling “squarely into the circular investment theme.” And he’s being polite. What’s actually happening is this: Nvidia gives money to companies. Those companies use that money to buy Nvidia GPUs. Nvidia books the GPU sales as revenue. Nvidia’s stock goes up. Nvidia uses the stock appreciation to fund more investments. The snake eats its own tail, but the tail is made of $40 billion in silicon.

To be fair, Bryson also acknowledged the strategy could help establish a “competitive moat” if executed successfully. Which is corporate-analyst speak for “this is either genius or the most expensive game of musical chairs in human history.”

The parallel to the telecom bubble of the early 2000s is almost too obvious to mention, so naturally we will mention it. Back then, companies like Lucent Technologies financed their own customers to buy networking equipment, booked the sales, and everyone clapped until the music stopped and $2 trillion in market value evaporated. But that was fiber optics. This is artificial intelligence. Completely different. The hype cycle has better marketing now.

🌿 The Gentle Awakening

There is something philosophically magnificent about a company that makes the shovels also buying the gold mine, financing the miners, and investing in the town that sells the miners lunch. At a certain point, you’re not participating in an ecosystem — you are the ecosystem, and everyone else is just living in your financial terrarium.

Nvidia’s strategy is, at its core, a bet that AI demand will remain so overwhelmingly enormous that circular capital flows won’t matter because the pie keeps growing faster than anyone can eat it. And so far, they’ve been right. Every quarter, the skeptics say “this is the quarter the music stops,” and every quarter Jensen Huang walks on stage in a leather jacket and announces another record.

But even the most committed optimists must occasionally wonder: what happens when you’ve invested in everyone who buys your product? When every major AI company owes you equity, runs on your hardware, and competes for your next-generation chips? You haven’t built a moat. You’ve built a kingdom. And kingdoms are wonderful until the peasants realize the castle walls are made of convertible notes.

👑 The Gold-Leaf Market Thesis

The $10 trillion question — quite literally, if Gerstner is to be believed — is whether Nvidia is making visionary investments or simply constructing the most elaborate customer loyalty program ever devised. The answer, as with most things in 2026, is probably both.

If AI demand continues its trajectory, Nvidia’s $40 billion is seed money for a monopoly that makes Standard Oil look like a lemonade stand. Every data center, every model training run, every AI startup pitch deck that mentions “GPU compute” is a tributary feeding the same river. The investments aren’t charity — they’re infrastructure guarantees.

But if demand plateaus, if the AI bubble softens, if it turns out that not every industry actually needs a trillion-parameter model to summarize emails — then Nvidia is sitting on $40 billion in equity positions in companies whose primary business model is buying things from Nvidia. At which point, the circular investment thesis stops being an academic concern and starts being the opening paragraph of a very expensive SEC filing.

For now, though, Jensen’s checkbook remains open, Goldman is raising estimates, and the leather jacket remains undefeated. The rest of us are just watching a company bet $40 billion that the future will need more GPUs. Which, to be honest, it probably will. But probably is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.

“We didn’t invest $40 billion in our customers. We invested $40 billion in demand certainty. There’s a difference, and if you can’t see it, you probably don’t own enough Nvidia stock.” — The Slap of Wisdom Investment Desk, adjusting its portfolio from inside a leather jacket it cannot afford