Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of the world’s most valuable company, Nvidia, has been flying around the world in the months leading up to Christmas. Rather than a sleigh, presumably most of this travel has happened in a private jet, and Huang brings with him thick wads of investible cash and stacks of mission-critical GPUs rather than a sack full of presents. But otherwise, we do think there’s something of Father Christmas about him.
Which companies have been on Huang’s ‘nice investment’ list this year? And which countries have been rolling out the diplomatic mince pies and brandy to tempt the Santa of semiconductors to build out their sovereign AI infrastructure? All will be revealed in our Christmas special blog post.
Nvidia’s investment rounds
When it comes to investing in businesses, Huang seems to have been full of festive cheer all year round.
By October, Nvidia had already invested in 50 venture capital funding rounds so far this year, according to TechCrunch, even without counting any investments made by its formal investing arm NVentures.
Nvidia invested in 22 companies in September alone.
The highest-profile by some distance was its investment into OpenAI. Nvidia first bought into the ChatGPT maker a year ago, but it caught the eye this time around by announcing up to $100bn in incremental investments based on OpenAI buying up to 10GB of compute capacity from Nvidia.
But Nvidia has also invested into OpenAI competitors including Elon Musk’s xAI, French LLM developer Mistral, open source LLM platform Reflection AI and the seed round for Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab.
British autonomous driving start-up Wayve could also receive buy-in from Huang. Wave announced in September that it was in discussions with Nvidia over a potential $500m investment in its next funding round, with Nvidia having already participated in Wayve’s series C last year.
Sovereign AI
As well as leaving cash investments under the trees of the world’s most innovative start-ups, Huang has also been speeding around the world, giving the gift of sovereign AI – or, to put it less festively, facilitating national-level AI infrastructure projects.
By May this year Nvidia’s technology was already underpinning sovereign AI projects in five contents – Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and South America – through 18 telco-led AI factories.
One of the most high-profile trips Huang has made was accompanying President Donald Trump on his trip to the UK in September.
As part of this trip, Huang announced a partnership with the UK to build out its own sovereign AI infrastructure. That could see up to 60GB of Grace Blackwell GPUs deployed in the UK, with key Nvidia partners like NScale (more on them below) and Coreweave investing up to $11bn into AI factories in the country.
Huang then travelled to South Korea in late October, where he announced plans to supply South Korea with over 260,000 Blackwell GPUs, then in November Huang visited Taiwan.
In case you’re not aware, Taiwan is basically the Lapland of the semiconductor world. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) makes pretty much all of the world’s computer chips (including Nvidia’s – Nvidia designs the chips, but outsources the actual making of them to TSMC).
According to TechNode, this was a case of Huang ensuring that the elves over at TSMC were able to keep up supply of the chips that every AI company in the world has put on its wish list. TSMC appears to have increased production capacity at its Southern Taiwan Science Park fab by 50% in order to meet soaring demand for Nvidia’s next-generation chips.
Later in November, Huang was in Saudi Arabia, discussing the buildout of a massive AI data centre there for which Elon Musk’s xAI is likely to be the first customer. That’s quite the round-the-world trip in the run-up to Christmas!
What does AI investment mean for the UK?
Countries are desperate to avoid the proverbial lump of coal down the chimney from Huang because of how critical AI is to businesses and national interests at the moment. A glance at the UK’s AI sector and the role it is playing in tech more broadly confirms this.
As of Q1 2025, the UK’s AI sector was worth $230bn according to data from TechNation, making it the largest AI market in Europe.
Huang himself has said that the UK is “too humble” about its AI potential, and backed this up by investing £500m into London-based cloud computing start-up NScale during his trip to the UK in September.
“We’re here to announce that the UK is going to be an AI superpower,” Huang told a press conference where the investment was unveiled.
AI can have a hugely positive impact on the UK’s tech ecosystem more broadly; TechNation found that 76% of tech leaders said that AI made their business more effective. And while it may be tempting to think that this is as a result of AI layoffs, it seems to be genuine value-add, as only 6% of companies surveyed by TechNation had made redundancies because of AI.
In other words, the investments and commitments that Huang and other AI infrastructure companies have made in the UK and the world over can bring a bit of mirth to tech companies everywhere.
Get in touch with our talented, experienced team of consultants if you’re looking to find work as an AI engineer – or if your company is looking to hire them. Oho Group is proud to connect technology’s greatest innovators together.
In the meantime, wishing you and yours a very merry Christmas from everyone at Oho Group!
