Nvidia, the world's dominant maker of AI chips, is spending big on the companies that use them.
According to The Information, whose report was picked up Sunday by outlets including Reuters, Seeking Alpha and TradingView, Nvidia is in talks to invest in Perplexity as part of an equity round that would value the AI search startup at more than $30 billion. The report cited people familiar with the discussions. Benzinga and Yahoo Finance noted that Perplexity — whose backers include Jeff Bezos — has seen its annualized revenue run rate climb to $750 million. The Information also reported Nvidia has invested in a data center power company.
Separately, Nvidia struck a roughly $6 billion deal with Poolside. Coverage describes the terms slightly differently: India Today and MSN report Nvidia is taking Poolside's technology and more than 100 engineers, Digitimes frames it as a licensing deal meant to accelerate Nvidia's Nemotron models, and Newsbytes describes an acquisition alongside a $1 billion investment at a $12 billion valuation. The common thread across reports is the goal — building a powerful "open-weight" AI model, meaning one whose underlying parameters are published for others to run and modify. That puts Nvidia in direct competition with OpenAI, Anthropic and China's DeepSeek.
Not everyone is applauding. A critic cited by Stocktwits argued the pattern amounts to the chipmaker "bailing out" AI firms, raising concerns about circular deals — where a supplier funds the customers who buy its products. The Hans India also flagged that rising memory costs could make AI infrastructure more expensive.
Why it matters: Nvidia is no longer just selling the shovels in the AI gold rush — it is funding the miners and digging itself, which blurs the line between a healthy market and one propped up by its own biggest supplier.