SoftBank Group Corp. is building up quite the investment portfolio.

A Bloomberg report published today cited anonymous sources as saying that the Japanese telecommunications giant has quietly acquired 4.9 percent of Nvidia Corp.’s stock, becoming its fourth-largest stakeholder. The insiders claim that the investment is worth $4 billion, just below the threshold past which SoftBank would have to publicly disclose the value of its shares. That’s significant because the news comes hot on the heels of an announcement in which the company officially divulged its stake in Nvidia but didn’t specify the price tag.

SoftBank shared the information on occasion of closing a record-breaking $93 billion for its Vision Fund. Expected to reach $100 billion once all is said and done, the fund is the centerpiece of a plan by SoftBank founder and Chief Executive Masayoshi Son to invest in the companies shaping the future of technology. Nvidia certainly fits the bill.

As the world’s leading supplier of graphics processing units, the chip maker is involved in practically every major trend that is preoccupying Silicon Valley today. Chief among them is artificial intelligence. GPUs’ ability to efficiently run neural networks has made them tremendously popular among auto suppliers, which are partnering with Nvidia one after another to support their autonomous driving projects. Companies from other segments are likewise harnessing its silicon for a wide range of applications.

Along the way, this demand has carried over to the public cloud, another fast-growing area that is no doubt on SoftBank’s radar. Providers such as Amazon Web Services Inc. offer a wide range of GPU-based instances to support customers’ AI projects, which is creating an important new revenue stream for Nvidia.

And that’s not even mentioning its role in the consumer world. The company is a key supplier to the nascent virtual reality ecosystem, an industry that could become a major consumer of GPUs if and when the technology takes off.

The fact that Nvidia is involved in so many fast-growing segments makes it a natural investment target for SoftBank not only from a strategic standpoint but on the financial front as well. Recognizing the chip maker’s strong prospects, Wall Street has sent its stock price tripling last year according to Bloomberg. Nvidia is actively working to maintain this momentum, an effort that most recently saw it launch a powerful new AI chip described as five times faster than last year’s model.

Image: Nvidia