At the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom conference in downtown San Francisco Wednesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said his company’s recent investments in OpenAI and Anthropic are likely to be its last in both, saying that once they go public as anticipated later this year, the opportunity to invest closes.
It could be that simple. While firms sometimes pile into companies until practically the eve of their public debut in search of more upside, Nvidia is minting money selling the chips that power both companies — it’s not like it needs to goose its returns by pouring even more money into either one.
Nvidia, for its part, isn’t offering much more on the matter. Asked for comment earlier today following Huang’s remarks, a spokesman pointed TechCrunch to a transcript from the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call, where Huang said all of Nvidia’s investments are “focused very squarely, strategically on expanding and deepening our ecosystem reach,” a goal its earlier stakes in both companies have arguably met.
Still, a few other dynamics might also explain the pullback, including the circular nature of these arrangements themselves. When Nvidia first announced it would invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI last September, MIT Sloan professor Michael Cusumano described it to the Financial Times as “kind of a wash,” observing that “Nvidia is investing $100 billion in OpenAI stock, and OpenAI is saying they are going to buy $100 billion or more of Nvidia chips.”
Growing concern that such deals could be creating an investment bubble might explain why the commitment shrank. The investment Nvidia finalized just last week as part of OpenAI’s $110 billion round came in at $30 billion — well short of that earlier pledge. (Huang has already dismissed another popular theory — that there is bad blood between the two companies — as “nonsense.”)
Meanwhile, Nvidia’s relationship with Anthropic has looked fraught in its own right. Just two months after Nvidia announced a $10 billion investment in November, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei took the stage at Davos and, without naming Nvidia directly, compared the act of U.S. chip companies selling high-performance AI processors to approved Chinese customers to “selling nuclear weapons to North Korea.” Ouch.
In retrospect, a nuclear weapons comparison was the least of it. Just days ago, the Trump administration blacklisted Anthropic, barring federal agencies and military contractors from using its tech after the company refused to allow its models to be used for autonomous weapons or mass domestic surveillance.
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