Here Are the Companies in Nvidia's $99 Billion Artificial Intelligence (AI) Portfolio. These 3 Are the Best of the Bunch

Here Are the Companies in Nvidia's $99 Billion Artificial Intelligence (AI) Portfolio. These 3 Are the Best of the Bunch

Adam Spatacco, The Motley Fool

Sun, September 13, 2026 at 8:43 PM GMT+3 5 min read

• NVDA -0.03%

Most investors may not realize it, but venture capital funds, private equity firms, and investment banks are not the only institutions that buy stocks or support start-ups. Corporations can also buy stocks on the open market, and, from time to time, they make strategic investments in private companies.

At the close of Nvidia's (NASDAQ: NVDA) fiscal second quarter, which ended July 26, the company boasted an investment portfolio totaling roughly $99 billion. Nvidia's investment book looks less like one of a stock-picker and more like a detailed map of the artificial intelligence (AI) supply chain.

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The question is not whether Jensen Huang can pick winners. Spoiler alert: He can. The better questions to ask are which pockets of the AI ecosystem is Nvidia funding, and which of those opportunities are available to retail investors?

Let's break down Nvidia's investment strategy and assess what stocks and businesses the company owns that may be a fit for your portfolio, too.

Where Nvidia is investing across the AI stack

The $99 billion in capital is spread across three buckets: publicly held stocks worth $47.7 billion, non-marketable securities worth $47.9 billion, and equity-method investments totaling $3.3 billion.

Public equities are split between listed common stock and a smaller layer of convertible preferred stock in public companies. According to Nvidia's 13F filing, the biggest names in this category are Intel, Space Exploration Technologies, and CoreWeave (NASDAQ: CRWV).

Nvidia invested $5 billion in Intel last September, while its SpaceX stock actually came from a check written for xAI after the two companies merged and then converted into a public holding. Meanwhile, Nvidia has invested in CoreWeave though multiple tranches over the last year.

During the second quarter earnings call, Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said the company has "invested nearly $50 billion in the frontier AI labs." The three names that matter most are OpenAI at $30 billion, Anthropic at up to $10 billion, and Safe Superintelligence at $5 billion.

The last bucket of investments revolves around stakes in infrastructure financiers as opposed to start-ups, frontier labs, and listed stocks. The one public name attached to this bucket is SB Energy, the SoftBank vehicle behind OpenAI's Ohio campus.

Of note, Nvidia's acquisition of Hugging Face for $12.9 billion is not included in this particular set of investments as the deal was announced after the quarter closed. Nvidia's capital is not sprinkled randomly; rather, it clusters in four core places.

First is the frontier labs. These companies are burning cash on compute faster than they can raise alternative financing like debt. So in this sense, Nvidia is becoming both a components supplier and a banker.

Second is the neocloud layer. CoreWeave and Nebius both build racks on Nvidia hardware and subsequently rent the capacity to developers who cannot get enough supply from the traditional hyperscalers -- Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

Third is the physical plumbing layer of the AI infrastructure stack. This is where photonics and optics sit, including Nvidia partners such as Coherent (NYSE: COHR), Lumentum, Marvell Technology (NASDAQ: MRVL), and Nokia.

Of note, Coherent shows up explicitly on Nvidia's 13F because the company's $2 billion investment went directly into common stock. Lumentum and Marvell do not follow the same structure. Each of these companies took $2 billion of convertible preferred, which is still public-company paper but is not listed common, so a 13F will not break it out until the preferred converts.

The fourth layer is a thin slice of applications and adjacent bets across biotech, robotics, and mobility through Nvidia's venture arm, NVentures. For now, these are moonshots, not the core of Nvidia's AI stack.

What Nvidia portfolio companies can retail investors buy?

Unfortunately, retail investors cannot directly buy OpenAI or the rest of Nvidia's private book. What they can buy are the public names Nvidia already owns: Intel, SpaceX, CoreWeave, Coherent, Nokia, Nebius, Lumentum, and Marvell.

In my eyes, the best of that bunch are CoreWeave, Coherent, and Marvell. CoreWeave is a direct proxy for the buildout of AI factories. The company owns GPUs and rents capacity to both hyperscalers and smaller developers, making it a direct beneficiary of the ongoing capital expenditure (capex) cycle. Coherent specializes in the optics bottleneck where dense chip clusters sit. Meanwhile, Marvell is the networking and silicon-photonics name Nvidia collaborated with to help integrate custom silicon into its fabric.

While buying Intel stock is tempting, shares have rallied hard since Nvidia's initial investment nearly a year ago. Meanwhile, SpaceX is still trying to prove its launch, satellite, and a broader AI ambitions can scale enough to justify its trillion-dollar valuation. Lastly, Nokia is more niche -- specializing in an AI-RAN for edge devices as opposed to core infrastructure across multiple platforms.

Ultimately, Coherent, CoreWeave, and Marvell line up nicely with the themes of rented compute, optical interconnects, and scale-up networking. These are established, usable applications within Nvidia's investment book that should fuel demand for more chips throughout the AI infrastructure era.

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Adam Spatacco has positions in Amazon, Microsoft, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon, Coherent, Intel, Lumentum, Marvell Technology, Microsoft, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Here Are the Companies in Nvidia's $99 Billion Artificial Intelligence (AI) Portfolio. These 3 Are the Best of the Bunch was originally published by The Motley Fool