AI demand isn’t slowing down, and neither is Nvidia.
Despite Chinese export restrictions, Nvidia grew its global revenue by 69% YoY to hit $44.1B in its Q1 FY’26. Its data center business drove 89% of that total figure — with nearly half of that coming from large cloud service providers.
During the quarter, Nvidia also invested heavily in developing its partner network to keep the momentum going.
Using CB Insights’ Business Graph, we mapped Nvidia’s Q1 business relationships to see where it’s betting on growth — and who it’s aligning with to get there. Several areas emerge:
AI infrastructure & data centers (key business relationships include HP and Oracle)
Pharmaceutical R&D expenses have increased tenfold since the 1980s, and pharma companies now allocate ~25% of their revenue to R&D — nearly double the share seen in the early 2000s.
Last year, it cost big pharma over $2.2B on average to develop a drug, an increase of $100M+ over the year prior.
In response to these cost pressures, pharma companies are using AI to make R&D more efficient. AI could potentially cut years off the discovery process and compress clinical trial times by up to 30%.
Hundreds of AI companies are working to make headway against rising R&D costs and get treatments to new patients faster.
OpenAI's $6.4B acquisition of io, Jony Ive's hardware company, last week was the largest private-to-private acquisition of all time — by a cool $1.5B.
Over 40% (7) of all-time $1B+ private-to-private acquisitions have happened in just the last year. OpenAI, Databricks, and Stripe have each spent over 15% of their total funding to date on acquisitions in the last 2 years.
What’s driving the shift?
The biggest private companies are happily operating at public company scale
AI is driving mega M&A deals in a mad dash for tech moats and full-stack offerings
AI talent wars are fueling the world's most expensive hiring strategy
GM announced this week that it’s calling off plans to invest $300M in electric vehicle production at its Buffalo, NY facility. Instead, it’ll funnel nearly 3x that amount ($888M) to the plant to produce its new V-8 engines.
This will be GM’s largest investment yet in a single plant — and a marked reversal on its electrification plans.
GM isn’t alone: Many of the auto industry’s most prominent EV champions — including Toyota, Ford, and Volvo — have scaled back their electric ambitions amid dampened demand and regulatory changes.
Private-market investors are also downshifting, with EV tech companies raising just 243 equity deals in 2024, a record 61% decline YoY.
CB Insights' emerging technology insights platform provides all the analysis and data from this newsletter. Our data is the easiest way to discover and respond to emerging tech.
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