How the ‘Imperial Six’ support imperialism – and vice versa (part 4: NVIDIA)

On March 11, Al Jazeera reported that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had declared six key U.S. and Israeli corporations to be fair targets for resistance in the region: Google, IBM, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle and Palantir.

These “Imperial Six” corporations uphold the U.S. economy of violence and destruction. Targeting them in solidarity with Iran and all nations under attack by imperialism will help us bring the war home and, ultimately, do away with imperialism altogether.

Part three of this six-article series looked at Microsoft, perhaps the most important U.S. company in the second half of the 20th century. Part 4 is diving into what might be the most important U.S. company of the 2020s: NVIDIA.

To understand NVIDIA, we must first understand the political economy of the generative artificial intelligence industry. While “artificial intelligence” can refer to a very wide range of technologies, most recent attention has focused on generative AI, or GenAI, in which a computer program generates text, images or other media in response to human prompts.

In the U.S., many people’s main interaction with GenAI is through job-specific products that bosses are forcing employees to use at work, with the eventual goal of replacing workers with chatbots (software applications designed to simulate human conversation). These startups include MagicSchool for teachers, Harvey for lawyers and many more. Despite capitalists’ visions of future profits, these tools are today wildly unprofitable and instead eat up expenditures. Company losses then provide a handy excuse to any businesses looking to fire workers.

Smaller products are powered by large language models (LLMs), engines that generate text by “predicting” each word in response to a user prompt, based on enormous amounts of data scraped from the internet. In the U.S., the most well-known LLMs are ChatGPT by OpenAI, Claude by Anthropic and Gemini by Google.

But since these LLMs are more oriented towards solving a problem for U.S. capitalism than for customers, they are currently losing money, despite tales to the contrary, as OpenAI and Anthropic look to manipulate the media ahead of potential initial public offerings (IPOs). The companies are locked into spending billions of dollars, mostly to meet the near-infinite demands for “compute,” or the computational power necessary to “train” LLMs on stolen copies of the world’s data.

How NVIDIA dominates 

Microchips power the data centers that create this massive computational power, and one company dominates the production of chips in the U.S. and in much of the world: NVIDIA. NVIDIA’s importance to the AI industry makes this company immensely profitable, despite losses in the AI industry itself, which is built on lies and funded by constant infusions of money from venture capitalists, big banks and NVIDIA itself. 

In 2026, it could be stated for illustration that the whole U.S. economy is positioned to be a machine to make NVIDIA as much money as possible.

It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that NVIDIA is deeply invested in every corner of U.S. imperialism, from Zionist genocide to oil-rich proxy states to massive surveillance of Black, Indigenous and other colonized communities on Turtle Island itself. As the world’s most valuable corporation, with a valuation that surpassed $5 trillion last year, NVIDIA is a major champion of U.S. imperialism. 

During World War I, Vladimir Lenin, opposing the “democratic socialists” of his time, argued that the role of workers during imperial warfare is to oppose the imperialists of their own country. In that vein, we say that NVIDIA’s destruction will be a beacon of freedom around the world, as colonized nations take control of their own destiny. 

Down with NVIDIA! Up with freedom for all oppressed peoples!