NVIDIA's shareholding disclosure triggers a surge in the stock prices of small-scale artificial intelligence companies, with one company experiencing a peak increase of up to 68%.

Investors are so fascinated by NVIDIA's AI story that they want a piece of any field the chip manufacturer ventures into.

According to Zhitong App, on Wednesday, NVIDIA disclosed in a regulatory filing that it holds stakes in several listed companies, including Arm, SoundHound AI, Recursion Pharmaceuticals, Nano-X Imaging, and Tusimple.

On Thursday, the stock prices of the companies supported by NVIDIA skyrocketed after the release of the 13F filing, except for Arm, which recently surpassed a market value of $130 billion.

There is no stock hotter than NVIDIA in the market. Its market value surpassed Amazon on Tuesday and Alphabet on Wednesday, making it the third-largest company in the US by market capitalization, only behind Apple and Microsoft. Due to seemingly unlimited demand for its AI chips, which power strong AI models for Alphabet-C, Amazon, OpenAI, and others, NVIDIA's stock price has risen over 200% in the past 12 months.

SoundHound AI, which utilizes AI for speech and sound recognition, saw its stock price surge by 68% on Thursday after NVIDIA disclosed its $3.7 million stake. NVIDIA had invested in SoundHound AI as part of a $75 million round of venture capital funding back in 2017.

Nano-X, which uses AI for medical imaging processing, experienced a 59% increase in its stock price on Thursday after NVIDIA disclosed its $380,000 investment. NVIDIA had previously entered the field through a venture investment in Israeli medical imaging startup Zebra Medical. Nano-X acquired Zebra in 2021.

Tusimple, an autonomous trucking company, saw its stock price soar by 40% on Thursday after NVIDIA disclosed its $3 million stake. This price surge occurred a month after the company announced its plan to delist from NASDAQ, citing "significant changes in the capital markets" since its IPO in 2021. Tusimple's initial public offering price was $40 per share, and the current trading price is around $0.50.

In a statement on January 17th, Tusimple stated, "The special committee determined that the benefits of being a public company no longer justify its costs, and the company is undergoing a transformation, believing that it can navigate better as a private company rather than a public one." NVIDIA had invested in Tusimple in 2017, four years before its IPO. NVIDIA's investment in biotech company Recursion is relatively new. Similar to TuSimple, Recursion went public in 2021, but NVIDIA made its investment two years later through a private investment in public equity (PIPE). In 2023, NVIDIA purchased $50 million worth of shares, and according to its filings, the current investment is valued at $76 million. The stock price of Recursion surged by 15% at one point on Thursday.

NVIDIA is set to report its quarterly earnings next week. Analysts expect its annual revenue to grow by over 200%, surpassing $20 billion. The recent investments made by the company may be more significant compared to the early-stage investments disclosed later on Wednesday, as they are at the forefront of the artificial intelligence boom. In recent years, NVIDIA has supported popular AI startups, including Cohere, Hugging Face, CoreWeave, and Perplexity.

Jonathan Cohen, Vice President of Applied Research at the company, stated in the $73.6 million funding round announced by Perplexity last month, "Artificial intelligence is changing the way consumers access information. Perplexity's world-class team is building a trusted AI-driven search platform that will help drive this transformation."