With IndiaBecoming one of the world's fastest-growing markets for AI developers and startupsNVIDIA is currently accelerating its efforts to build strong relationships with these companies from their infancy. NVIDIA announced this week...A series of cooperation plans targeting the Indian marketIts core objective is to intervene at an earlier stage in the AI startup lifecycle, thereby cultivating potential future super customers.
Partnering with Activate Ventures, focusing on "incubation period" investments
The most notable aspect of this move is NVIDIA's collaboration with early-stage venture capital fund Activate.
Activate, founded by Aakrit Vaish, has a $7500 million initial fund and plans to invest in approximately 25 to 30 AI startups. Through this partnership, Activate's portfolio companies will gain priority access to NVIDIA's technical experts.
Aakrit Vaish calls their investment strategy "inception investing," which means they start contacting technology teams months before they officially launch their companies and work closely with them as they grow.
Activate's backers are impressive, including prominent venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, Perplexity co-founder Aravind Srinivas, Peak XV managing director Shailendra Singh, and Indian third-party payment service Paytm CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma, highlighting its strong connections in the early-stage investment field.
For NVIDIA, the logic behind partnering with early-stage venture capital firms is very straightforward: the earlier a relationship is established with a promising AI startup, the more likely these companies are to rely on NVIDIA's computing infrastructure as they scale. Aakrit Vaish points out that as startups grow, their AI computing power consumption increases exponentially, so early technology partnerships are key for NVIDIA to secure huge future business opportunities.
AI giants flock to India, with NVIDIA expanding its local reach.
The timing of this collaboration announcement coincides with India's AI Impact Summit held in New Delhi. This summit attracted leading technology companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Although NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang was unable to attend due to unforeseen circumstances, a high-level delegation led by Executive Vice President Jay Puri actively met with AI researchers, startups, and partners in the region.
In addition to Activate, NVIDIA already has a large-scale Inception investment program in India, which currently supports more than 4000 local startups. To further expand its reach, NVIDIA also announced this week an alliance with several venture capital firms, including Accel, Peak XV, Z47, Elevation Capital, and Nexus Venture Partners, to jointly discover and fund AI startups.
In addition, NVIDIA has partnered with AI Grants India, a non-profit organization co-founded by Vaibhav Domkundwar and Bhasker (Bosky) Kode, with the goal of supporting more than 10000 early-stage entrepreneurs over the next 12 months. Prior to this, NVIDIA also joined the India Deep Tech Alliance in November 2025 to provide strategic and technical guidance to emerging technology teams.
Precise selection, providing customized technical support
Compared to Inception, which covers thousands of startups globally and tends to cast a wide net, NVIDIA's collaboration with venture capital firms like Activate is more like establishing a "selective filtering mechanism." By using the venture capitalists' perspective to initially screen out high-potential technology teams, NVIDIA can more accurately and promptly connect scarce engineering expertise and resources directly to these future stars.
Analysis of viewpoints
NVIDIA's move in India perfectly illustrates the concept of "casting a long line to catch a big fish."
In the past, when we looked at NVIDIA, we mostly focused on how they sold tens of thousands of Hopper or Blackwell chips to cloud giants like Microsoft and Meta. But as generative AI enters a period of explosive growth in applications, future computing power consumption will largely come from "AI-native startups" scattered around the world.
India currently boasts the fastest-growing pool of technical talent outside the United States. NVIDIA understands that rather than waiting for these startups to grow up and then compete for orders with AMD, Intel, or cloud giants for self-developed chips, it is better for them to get used to using the CUDA ecosystem and NVIDIA's underlying technology architecture "before they even start their companies".
Once these startups become accustomed to NVIDIA's development environment and rely on its optimization tools (such as NIM microservices), the switching costs for them to migrate to NVIDIA in the future will be extremely high. This is not only an investment of capital and hardware, but also a long-term strategy for NVIDIA to consolidate its AI ecosystem moat.
