Nvidia pours over $40B into AI partners in 2026, turning the chipmaker into the industry's kingmaker

When the company selling the shovels also owns equity in most of the miners, demand gets hard to read. Nvidia investing up and down its own customer base, anchored by a reported thirty billion dollar OpenAI stake, is the clearest sign yet of how circular the AI capital stack has become. The question to hold onto is how much of the reported spend is truly independent versus Nvidia quietly funding its own revenue.