Nvidia Corp. CEO Jensen Huang during the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) Sports Day event in Hsinchu, Taiwan, Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025.
Lam Yik Fei | Bloomberg | Getty Images
When Nvidia This week the company announced it would acquire a $2 billion stake in chip design company Synopsys. This was just the latest in a series of massive investments announced by the chipmaker this year.
Nvidia has also announced that it will take a $1 billion stake in Nokia and invest $5 billion in it Intel and $10 billion to Anthropic – $18 billion in investment commitments from those four deals, not including smaller venture capital investments.
That doesn’t even include the biggest commitment of all: $100 billion to buy OpenAI shares over several years, although there’s no final deal yet, Nvidia Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said Tuesday at the UBS Global Technology and AI conference.
It’s a lot of money and a lot of deals, but Nvidia has the money to write big checks.
At the end of October, Nvidia had $60.6 billion in cash and short-term investments. That’s up from $13.3 billion in January 2023, shortly after OpenAI released ChatGPT. That introduction three years ago was key to making Nvidia’s chips its most valuable technology product.
As Nvidia has grown from a gaming technology maker to the most valuable U.S. company, its balance sheet has become a fortress and investors are increasingly wondering what the company will do with its cash.
“No company has grown at the scale we’re talking about,” CEO Jensen Huang said on Nvidia’s earnings call last month when asked what the chipmaker plans to do with all its money.
Analysts polled by FactSet expect the company to generate $96.85 billion in free cash flow this year alone and $576 billion in free cash flow over the next three years.
Some analysts would like to see Nvidia spend more money on stock buybacks.
“Nvidia will generate over $600 billion in free cash flow over the next few years and should still have plenty left for opportunistic buybacks,” Ben Reitzes, an analyst at Melius Research, wrote in a note on Monday.
The company’s board increased its stock buyback authority in August, increasing the total by $60 billion. In the first three quarters of the year, the company spent $37 billion on stock buybacks and dividends.
“We will continue to conduct share buybacks,” Huang said.
Nvidia is doing buybacks, but that’s not all.
Huang said Nvidia’s balance sheet strength gives its customers and suppliers confidence that future orders, which he described as “offtake,” will be fulfilled.
“Our reputation and credibility are incredible,” Huang said. “That requires a really strong balance sheet to support the level and rate of growth and the magnitude of that.”
Kress, Nvidia’s CFO, said Tuesday that the company’s “biggest focus” is ensuring it has enough cash to deliver its next-generation products on time. Most of Nvidia’s largest suppliers are equipment manufacturers such as Foxconn and Dell, which may require Nvidia to provide working capital to manage inventory and build additional production capacity.
Huang called his company’s strategic investments “really important work” and said as companies like OpenAI grow, it leads to additional consumption of AI and Nvidia’s chips. Nvidia has stated that no investment is required to use its products, but this is the case with all of them.
“All the investments we’ve made so far – all of them, period – are related to expanding Cuda’s reach and expanding the ecosystem,” Huang said, referring to the company’s artificial intelligence software.
In a filing in October, Nvidia said it had already made $8.2 billion in investments in private companies. For Nvidia, these investments have replaced acquisitions.
Nvidia’s $7 billion acquisition of Mellanox in 2020 is the company’s largest ever and laid the foundation for its current AI products, which are not individual chips but entire server racks that sell for about $3 million.
But the company faced regulatory problems when it tried to buy a chip technology company arm for $40 billion in 2020.
Nvidia canceled the deal before it could be completed after regulators in the US and UK raised concerns about its impact on competition in the chip industry. Nvidia has acquired a number of smaller companies in recent years to bolster its development teams, but has not completed a multi-billion dollar acquisition since the Arm deal collapsed.
“It’s hard to think about very significant, large types of mergers and acquisitions,” Kress said at an investor conference this week. “I wish there was one, but it won’t be easy.”
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