Nvidia’s corporate development team must be exhausted. They’ve inked roughly 20 deals this year, according to financial data firm PitchBook and The Information’s reporting. For comparison, once-prolific VC investor Tiger Global Management has done about 30 startup deals this year.
We’ve seen this movie before. In 2020, during an unprecedented fintech boom, I chronicled Stripe’s investment spree. One boom-and-bust cycle later, Stripe has taken a big step back from VC deals—making only three investments this year—as the economy has pummeled the broader fintech category. Now a decades-old chipmaker benefiting from record sales of its artificial intelligence chips has taken Stripe’s spot.
Nvidia’s revenue reached $13.5 billion in the second quarter, double that for the same period last year, and it has forecast a 170% surge in third-quarter revenue. Put simply: It has more money than it knows what to do with, so it’s trying to invest in every conceivable customer, partner and acquisition target—or “anything that smells like AI,” as one tech investor put it—before it loses momentum. And that will happen. Eventually, the supply of its chips will balance out with demand and Nvidia’s explosive growth will slow.
