Nvidia's $99 billion AI portfolio: OpenAI gets $30 billion

Nvidia's investment book, worth roughly $99 billion at the end of its fiscal second quarter on July 26, looks less like a stock picker's list and more like a map of the AI supply chain. The capital sits in three buckets -- $47.7 billion of publicly held stocks, $47.9 billion of non-marketable securities and $3.3 billion of equity-method investments -- and clusters around four themes: frontier labs, the neocloud layer, the physical plumbing of optics and photonics, and a thin slice of adjacent bets through NVentures.

The company is effectively playing two roles at once. In the frontier labs, where cash is burned on compute faster than debt can be raised, Nvidia acts as both components supplier and banker. Names like CoreWeave and Nebius form the neocloud layer, renting Nvidia-powered racks to developers who cannot get enough supply from the traditional hyperscalers -- AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. Around the optical bottleneck sit Coherent, Lumentum, Marvell and Nokia, some of them through convertible preferred stock rather than listed common shares.

For retail investors, the practical question is which of those public holdings are worth buying. The author argues CoreWeave, Coherent and Marvell are the best of the bunch, tied to rented compute, optical interconnects and scale-up networking. Intel is seen as already rallied, SpaceX as still proving a trillion-dollar valuation, and Nokia as niche. The stakes hinge on whether the AI capex cycle keeps demanding those picks, and on whether the frontier labs eventually justify the nearly $50 billion Nvidia has poured into them.