Nvidia has generated roughly $193 billion in net income over the past 12 months, giving Jensen Huang something few CEOs in history have possessed: the resources to pursue enormous opportunities almost anywhere he sees them. This week offered a striking example. Nvidia agreed to spend $6 billion to license technology from AI startup Poolside and bring more than 100 of its engineers into Nvidia to develop powerful open-weight AI models competing with China’s DeepSeek and Kimi.
There seems to be no end to Nvidia’s ambition.
Why is the world’s dominant AI chip company spending billions developing AI models?
Because Nvidia is no longer simply an AI chip company.
It increasingly participates across almost the entire AI technology stack: GPUs, CPUs, networking, advanced systems, CUDA and software, AI factories, cloud infrastructure, AI models, robotics, autonomous vehicles and digital twins.
In that sense, Nvidia increasingly reminds me of Amazon.
Nvidia is already worth about $5.1 trillion—nearly twice Amazon’s roughly $2.8 trillion market value—even though Amazon generates more than twice Nvidia’s annual revenue.
Amazon grew from an online bookseller into one of the world’s largest companies by expanding into the infrastructure surrounding commerce and computing. Nvidia appears to be doing something similar around AI.
If the analogy holds, Nvidia may still be in the early stages of what it could become. If AI becomes a foundational technology of the global economy, Nvidia’s ultimate size may depend less on the semiconductor market than on how much of the larger AI economy it can capture.
Nvidia has extraordinary financial firepower behind that expansion.
Quarterly revenue just reached $96.2 billion, up 106% from a year ago. Data Center revenue reached $89.0 billion, up 117%, while net income was $59.7 billion in three months.
A $6 billion deal would transform most companies. Nvidia earned nearly ten times that amount in one quarter.
That creates a powerful flywheel:
AI growth → Nvidia profits → investment across the AI ecosystem → a larger AI ecosystem → greater demand for accelerated computing.
There is also a question worth watching. Nvidia increasingly invests in and helps finance parts of the same AI ecosystem that purchases its technology. Investors will need to distinguish between independent demand and demand Nvidia itself helps finance.
For now, the underlying market signals remain remarkably strong.
Nvidia expects approximately $108 billion in revenue next quarter, while its Data Center business has more than doubled from an already enormous base.
The question may no longer be how large Nvidia can become as a semiconductor company.
It may be:
How much of the AI economy does Nvidia ultimately intend to occupy?
JeffreyLCooper.com
Technology Analyst & Author
When Machines Begin to Dream amazon.com/dp/B0H85WBVC8
★★★★★ “A rare sci-fi novel that kept me glued to its pages from beginning to end.” — Readers’ Favorite
#Nvidia #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #Semiconductors #Technology