17B sounds low.

> Corporate development-led AI equity investments alone exceeded $40 billion in just the first four months of 2026

The accusation in the headline is that this activity contributed to the general shortage of GPUs which would, if true, increase their pricing power and profit margins even on chips sold to other customers. So I don't think it's a direct comparison to their equity deals.

Is this the only reason Nvidia made money? No, obviously. But is it adding fuel to the fire? If there is a bubble will this make the fallout worse? Seems likely.

More importantly this suggests a second plausible reason the board might have wanted to wrest control of the company away from him. (The other hypothetical one being that he was doing illegal stuff.)