NVIDIA just wrote a $5 billion check for a stake in Intel. It's the AI gold rush in microcosm: the biggest winner is now bankrolling its own boom.

The Intel deal is one small piece of an extraordinary surge. In 2025, through October, nearly one trillion dollars in AI infrastructure commitments has surfaced: $500 billion from Stargate alone; approximately $150 billion in NVIDIA-driven strategic and supply commitments; and a cascade of hyperscaler, private-equity, and sovereign GPU procurement moving at unprecedented velocity. This isn't a tech cycle. It's a capital reordering.

And it reveals a fundamental power shift—the company at the center of the AI buildout is now funding it.

Every boom has two sides: those writing checks and those cashing them. The spenders? Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Amazon. Over $750 billion in datacenter spending between 2023 and 2025. Nearly $400 billion in 2025 alone. In recent earnings calls on October 29–30, 2025, all four signaled plans to increase spending materially in 2026. And the investor base is multiplying. Private equity firms are raising billion-dollar AI infrastructure funds. Investment banks are structuring datacenter acquisitions. Sovereign wealth funds are locking in GPU capacity years in advance.

The recipients span the entire infrastructure stack: GPUs, memory, networking, cooling, and power. Plenty of companies are winning on volume. But one company captured the lion's share—NVIDIA. 80–95% of the AI accelerator market. 70–80% gross margins. Between 2023 and 2025, revenue surged from $27B to $130B while market value exploded nearly tenfold.

NVIDIA didn't just participate in the AI boom. It won.

Now, with a war chest built from these sales, NVIDIA is deploying capital strategically to control both supply and demand in the infrastructure buildout. Unlike traditional VCs who simply take equity stakes, NVIDIA takes equity and turns portfolio companies into GPU customers locked into its ecosystem. The pattern repeats across the portfolio. In July 2023, a $50 million investment in Recursion Pharmaceuticals enabled the biotech firm to build BioHive-2, an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD supercomputer with 504 H100 GPUs, completed in May 2024. By mid-2025, Perplexity AI, backed by NVIDIA since April 2024, was likely deploying Blackwell GPUs for its AI search engine, consistent with NVIDIA’s strategy of providing early access to its latest hardware.

The loop is elegant: NVIDIA Invests Capital and Takes Equity → Portfolio Companies Buy GPUs → Additional GPU Revenue → Portfolio Equity Appreciates → Larger War Chest → Repeat. Each investment converts to infrastructure deployment. Each partnership locks in ecosystem adoption, creating a reinforcing cycle where NVIDIA effectively funds its own customer base.

On March 10, 2025, Oracle CEO Safra Catz announced a figure on an earnings call that stunned analysts: $48 billion in new cloud contracts signed in a single quarter, the largest booking quarter in the company's history. The backlog hit $130 billion, up 63% year-over-year. Then came the kicker: those numbers didn't even include Stargate. The $500 billion OpenAI-Oracle-SoftBank megaproject announced two months earlier wasn't included in the reported backlog. By late September, Stargate had committed more than $400 billion and secured seven gigawatts of capacity.

An even larger wave followed. Between mid-September and late October 2025, the AI infrastructure market detonated with hundreds of billions more in commitments. Anchoring the blitz: NVIDIA and OpenAI's up to $100 billion letter of intent for 10 gigawatts of compute, with the first gigawatt online mid-2026. Flanking it: CoreWeave signing $36.6 billion in five days—$22.4 billion with OpenAI, $14.2 billion with Meta. AMD locking in 6 gigawatts with OpenAI. Broadcom securing another 10 gigawatts of custom ASICs starting late 2026.