[Digital Today reporter Jinju Hong] Nvidia is being assessed as expanding its influence across the AI ecosystem by going beyond an AI chip supplier to take on the role of an investor and a funding channel.

Business Insider reported on Aug. 13 that Rob Lalka, a business professor at Tulane University, pointed out that Nvidia is not stopping at selling semiconductors in the AI boom but is building a structure that involves holding stakes in related companies and participating in the flow of funds.

Lalka likened Nvidia's current position to a modern-day gold rush. He said Nvidia is "not just selling picks, it is also a shareholder in the mine, and now it is becoming a bank lending money to prospectors." He meant Nvidia is widening its influence by supplying key chips needed for the spread of AI while directly investing in companies that buy those chips or designing financing structures.

Nvidia is reported to have invested tens of billions of dollars in OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI, or entered into investment commitments. Lalka also said Nvidia holds stakes in many AI startups that buy its hardware. He added that among data center companies, it has stakes in CoreWeave and Nebius, which need its processors.

More recently, it has joined forces with large Wall Street investment firms to raise large-scale funding to expand AI infrastructure based on Nvidia chips. Nvidia is pursuing a latest financing deal with Apollo and KKR to raise $500 billion in AI infrastructure funding. It is a structure in which chip sales, equity investment and infrastructure finance are linked as one axis.

The deal network has put Nvidia at the center of the AI boom, but warnings are also emerging that excessive dependence in the ecosystem could be a risk. U.S. billionaire investor Mark Cuban recently wrote on X, "Nvidia is playing a role similar to the IPO market during the dot-com bubble" and "is funding everyone." He said, "If a breakthrough emerges from other chip suppliers or Nvidia makes a mistake, everything could collapse. It's really scary."

Michael Burry, the investor known for the film 'The Big Short,' offered a similar view. Burry assessed last November that "Nvidia is at the center of everything, like Cisco during the dot-com boom." He has also recently pointed out that Nvidia is expanding too aggressively as it tries to grow cyclical spending to a "biblical scale."

Nvidia management has also publicly mentioned the market's dependence on the company in the AI market. Jensen Huang (젠슨 황), Nvidia's chief executive officer, referred last November to a related meme that spread online and said, "We are effectively holding up the Earth. You can't say it's not true."

Still, Nvidia has so far backed up the market's high expectations with results. Revenue for the most recent three months ended April 26 was about $82 billion, up 85 percent from a year earlier. Net profit in the same period surged 211 percent to $58 billion. With Nvidia not only the biggest beneficiary of demand for AI chips but also expanding the flow of capital in the AI industry through investment and finance, market attention is expected to remain focused on the pace of its expansion and the degree of dependence going forward.