Nvidia Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) is the largest company in the world, but Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) says that “allowing a single company to effectively be the gatekeeper for the world’s AI future is dangerous and poses dire economic risks.”

A Wall Street Journal investigation published Monday details how Nvidia has become the AI industry’s most powerful financier, investing tens of billions in the same startups and cloud providers that buy its GPUs.

How The Flywheel Works

Nvidia invested roughly $800 million in open-source AI startup Reflection, anchoring a $2 billion funding round.

Most of that cash flows right back to Nvidia through GPU purchases.

One large Reflection investor called the company “a business arm” of Nvidia.

At a recruiting event in London, a Reflection executive told a potential hire: “When you are talking to us, you are talking to Nvidia.”

CoreWeave (NASDAQ:CRWV), one of Nvidia’s largest outside investments, has privately told rival chipmakers that it won’t use non-Nvidia chips for fear of upsetting its biggest backer, according to the Journal.

Nvidia recently agreed to buy back up to $6.3 billion of its own chips if CoreWeave can’t lease them to customers by 2032.

Nvidia also paid $20 billion to license Groq’s fast-inference chip technology and hire away its leadership, structuring the transaction to avoid standard acquisition review.

Senators Warren and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) sent Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang a letter Thursday saying the Groq deal “appears to be structured to evade scrutiny by antitrust regulators.”

Historical Parallels

In the early 1900s, Standard Oil controlled over 90% of U.S. oil refining and used predatory pricing and railroad rebates to crush competitors.

The Supreme Court broke it up in 1911, but by then entire regional competitors had been driven out of business and independent refiners had lost access to distribution networks that took decades to rebuild.

Half a century later, Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) held over 80% of the PC processor market and used loyalty rebates to keep manufacturers from buying AMD chips.

The EU hit Intel with a $1.45 billion fine in 2009, but AMD had already been starved of market share for years, nearly went bankrupt, and had to sell off its manufacturing arm.

By the time regulators acted, the damage to AMD’s ability to compete had reshaped the entire chip industry, and opened the door for ARM-based processors to fill the gap Intel’s dominance had created.

What Are Prediction Markets Saying?

Polymarket bettors give Nvidia a 67% chance of finishing 2026 as the world’s largest company by market cap, with Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) both at 14%.

A separate “AI bubble burst” contract prices a 23% chance of an industry downturn by December on $2 million in volume.

One of the triggers for that market is NVDA falling 50% from its all time high, which would put the stock below $104. It’s trading at $174.69 this morning.

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