Collaborative Fund, the 15-year-old, New York-based generalist venture firm that has roughly $1 billion under management and which made early bets on Lyft, Reddit, Sweetgreen, and Olipop, among others, is taking a stake in the soccer club D.C. United and its stadium, Audi Field.

It’s the latest — and smallest — firm to try something that Thrive Capital opened the door to just months ago: turning venture money into pro sports ownership.

To recap, Joshua Kushner’s Thrive launched a new vehicle, Thrive Eternal, explicitly built to hold “iconic franchises and cultural institutions” for decades, funded by many of the same investors already in Thrive’s venture and growth funds. The firm kicked things off by announcing a stake in the San Francisco Giants. Months later, the same vehicle — with former Disney CEO Bob Iger, a Thrive partner, joining as co-owner — bought the Lakers outright for a record $12.5 billion.

That’s new. Historically, money has poured into pro sports two other ways: individual tech fortunes, and private equity. For example, Vinod Khosla and his family agreed this summer to buy the Seattle Seahawks for a record $9.6 billion soon after the Khosla family also took a stake in the San Francisco 49ers alongside OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor. That was a personal-wealth play, the kind we’ve seen over and over.

Private equity firms have also been at this for years, including Sixth Street, which holds stakes in the Boston Celtics, the New England Patriots, and MLB’s San Francisco Giants; Ares, which owns a piece of the Miami Dolphins outright and separately financed Chelsea’s stadium plans through a $500 million preferred-equity deal; RedBird, which owns AC Milan outright and holds a minority stake in Fenway Sports Group, the holding company behind Liverpool and the Red Sox; and Arctos, with minority positions scattered across MLB, the NFL, the NBA, and European soccer. (Apollo, the newest entrant, has mostly stuck to sports financing deals so far rather than ownership stakes.)

Thrive and Collaborative are doing neither of those things. At the same time, the two firms’ approaches to sports ownership look very different. Thrive built a standalone, permanent-capital vehicle specifically to hold trophy assets. Collaborative is investing out of the same early-stage fund it uses to write seed and Series A checks, and treating the deal less like something to buy and hold and almost more like infrastructure.

In a memo shared with TechCrunch, Collaborative Fund founder and managing partner Craig Shapiro framed the deal as an extension of what the firm already does. “A franchise is the ultimate consumer product,” he wrote, arguing that D.C. United’s status as one of Major League Soccer’s original clubs gives Collaborative access to an institution with a decades-long fan base to build on.

He pointed to the tailwinds around American soccer specifically (a World Cup just behind the sport, the LA Olympics ahead of it, soaring youth participation numbers in the U.S.) as well as D.C.’s ownership of Audi Field in Washington, D.C., plus a talent-development pipeline through Loudoun County, Virginia, and rights to a future Baltimore expansion team.

Indeed, the thesis Shapiro laid out at a TechCrunch StrictlyVC event Thursday night in New York is less about owning a piece of an appreciating asset – the sports team itself – and more about what the team makes possible. Collaborative wants to turn Audi Field into what he describes as a living showcase for its own portfolio.

As a backer of both fitness band maker Whoop and the beverage brand Olipop, for example, Collaborative Fund is imagining a WHOOP wearables activation for fans, or Olipop drinks woven into game-day concessions. He’s thinking about the stadium’s foot traffic — tens of thousands of people showing up on a predictable schedule — as a distribution channel at a time when, because AI is making more of daily life feel synthetic, live experiences are becoming more valuable.

Shapiro doesn’t dwell on this, but it surely helped sell Collaborative’s investors that team valuations have been soaring, so the stake could pay off on its own. Soccer valuations in particular have been on a tear. Inter Miami’s franchise value has roughly doubled in the two years since Lionel Messi arrived, MLS’s average club value is up roughly 134% since 2019, and D.C. United’s own valuation has climbed from $35 million in 2008 to $785 million today, factoring in its ownership of Audi Field and the surrounding real estate.

If Shapiro is right that a franchise is also “the ultimate consumer product,” it could be a pretty good place to park money. Time will tell.

The deal is subject to MLS approval.

Founder, CEO, and tireless Nvidia hype man Jensen Huang told attendees at the Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology conference on Thursday why his company’s AI domination — and revenues — will continue its record-breaking growth streak through the end of next year.

He can see the future.

There’s been endless hand-wringing over whether Nvidia’s party will end as it faces increasing competition for GPUs and AI chips from all directions: the hyperscalers (Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, each building their own) and the AI labs (Anthropic and OpenAI, which are building their own) as well as from newly public competitor Cerebras and startups such as Etched.

“Most people think Nvidia builds a chip. I mean, you need airplanes to ship what we build,” Huang said, adding that the company continues to battle a perception from its early days. Nvidia invented the GPU, which back then were largely sold to consumers to improve PC gaming. “One GPU now is not $399. It’s $8.5 million dollars. That’s one GPU, all connected with NVLink, 2 million parts, right? 250,000 kilowatts. That’s a GPU, and we ship thousands of them.”

He added that orders for just one product, a computer system that combines 36 Grace CPUs with 72 Blackwell GPUs is currently experiencing 27% month-to-month sales growth.

Huang didn’t limit his bullish view to current sales though. He took the opportunity to reiterate Nvidia’s revenue outlook for next year — guidance the company provided last month when it reported yet another record-breaking revenue quarter. That’s when he first said revenue could grow by 70% next year.

“I think we could grow 70% year over year. We’re confident about that,” Huang said again on Thursday. Analysts expect the company to end its current fiscal year at about $400 billion in revenue. So 70% growth would mean around $680 billion next year.

Huang explained why he’s confident: his company is so embedded in every area of AI that he believes he can see the future.

“Nvidia runs every model. Every single lab can use us,” the CEO said, mentioning that this includes models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, as well as open-weight offerings. “We are a foundational platform of the AI ecosystem, foundational platform of the AI industry.”

Nvidia’s fingers extend all the way from its suppliers, such as memory chip makers, to data center projects and startups.

“We’re tracking every single gigawatt of land, power, shell around the world. Literally everything on the planet,” he said. (“Shell” refers to the shell of a data center building before it is outfitted with computers).

“I mean, just think about all my partners. How many neoclouds are reporting back to us? How many OEMs are reporting back to us? How many clouds are reporting back to us? How many AI native companies are reporting back to us? We’re working with everybody, and so we kind of know where everything is,” he said.

That comment led to inevitable questions about Nvidia’s so-called circular deals, in which it invests in companies that turn around and buy its wares. Such schemes famously contributed to the downfall of a previous generation of internet build-out suppliers like Lucent Technologies.

Huang had a simple, albeit cheeky, response. “Well, it’s not circular because we put a little bit of money in, and a lot of money comes back.” He went on to joke, “I look at the spreadsheet, we put in $1 and $100 comes back in. Is that circular? If that is, let’s do more of that.”

Quips aside, he insisted that before any of these companies gets an investment, Nvidia makes sure it has real contracts generating revenue from customers. All told, he said he’s seen $100 billion worth of such contracts, “I’m not taking any risks. … I need a sure thing.”

Time will tell whether Nvidia’s stronghold on AI can really persist long term. If there’s one golden rule of the tech industry, it’s that all big things get disrupted. Right now, even Huang admits that much of AI’s growth is coming from AI native startups that are raising vast sums and spending most of that cash on their own AI use. As the AI industry matures, expect companies to become more efficient in how they use infrastructure and tokens.

But for now, Nvidia has its finger in every pie and sees another year of plenty in its future.

Samsung Electronics is partnering with French AI company Mistral AI to develop customized AI models for semiconductor design, engineering and manufacturing, extending the use of AI from chip development into the factory itself.

The partnership, announced during a South Korea-France summit in Paris, will bring Mistral’s AI services and models into Samsung’s semiconductor operations. Samsung plans to use Mistral’s models, including Mistral Large, to develop customized, on-premises AI systems for its Device Solutions division.

The companies will also work on an AI platform and management system designed specifically for semiconductor operations. A key part of the deal is how the AI will be deployed. Samsung plans to run the models on its own infrastructure rather than sending sensitive semiconductor information to an outside cloud.

That could be particularly important for chipmakers operating increasingly AI-driven factories, where design information, manufacturing processes and factory data can be highly sensitive. Mistral’s approach allows companies to keep control of their data, models, computing resources and operating environment.

For IT leaders, the deployment provides a high-stakes test of whether on-premises AI can improve sensitive industrial operations while giving companies control over their data, infrastructure and security.

Samsung said it plans to apply the technology to rapid fab-data analysis, defect detection and equipment optimization. The effort is expected to cover Samsung’s memory, logic and foundry businesses.

“The increasing complexity involved in AI chip design and manufacturing requires continuous innovation in semiconductor technologies,” said Young Hyun Jun, vice chairman and CEO of Samsung Electronics’ Device Solutions division, according to The Korea Herald. “We look forward to working with Mistral and supporting the evolving needs of customers, while delivering new breakthroughs across the semiconductor ecosystem essential to the AI era.”

AI moves onto the factory floor

The practical goal is to use AI to spot problems earlier and make semiconductor production more efficient.

Semiconductor fabrication involves numerous interconnected production steps, with equipment settings and process conditions affecting the number of usable chips produced from each wafer. Samsung wants customized AI models to analyze that data and help identify defects or optimize processes faster.

As manufacturing becomes more difficult at advanced process nodes, even small improvements in yield can have a meaningful effect on production economics. The partnership therefore puts AI in a role that goes beyond office productivity or software development: helping determine how physical chips are made.

Samsung also backs Mistral financially

The operational partnership follows earlier reports that Samsung was considering a major investment in Mistral AI. Samsung ultimately led Mistral’s €3 billion Series D round, which valued the French company at more than €21 billion, although Samsung has not disclosed the size of its individual investment. The investment gives Samsung a financial stake in the company providing technology for its semiconductor AI initiative.

What this could mean for Samsung

Samsung’s approach could offer a model for organizations that want to apply AI to sensitive industrial operations without sending proprietary information to an external cloud. However, running models on-premises still requires companies to secure the infrastructure, govern access to operational data and validate AI recommendations before using them in production.

Samsung and Mistral have announced intended applications rather than measurable results. Neither company has disclosed a deployment schedule, technical benchmarks or expected yield improvements, so the project’s value will depend on whether it can outperform Samsung’s existing defect-detection and equipment-management systems.

Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch said, “AI is reshaping how we build complex technologies, from silicon to software,” according to Samsung’s announcement. “We are proud to support Samsung Electronics with our expertise in electronics and semiconductors, helping to improve how chips are designed and manufactured, and to accelerate technical progress across the global semiconductor and AI value chain.”

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