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 elaboration. 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, which have raised questions about a potential bubble. When Nvidia first announced it would invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI last September, MIT Sloan professor Michael Cusumano blandly 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.”
That could 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. If there is more to the story, Huang isn’t saying, having dismissed suggestions of 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 before Huang appeared at the banking conference, 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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Within hours of that announcement, OpenAI struck its own deal with the Pentagon — a move Anthropic has called “mendacious” and the public appears to have viewed similarly. Within 24 hours, Claude had shot to the top of Apple’s U.S. App Store, overtaking ChatGPT. (At the end of January, Anthropic was outside the top 100, according to Sensor Tower data.)
Where that leaves Nvidia is holding stakes in two companies that, at this particular moment, are pulling in very different directions, and potentially dragging customers and partners along for the ride.
Whether Huang saw any of this coming, given Nvidia’s web of partnerships, is impossible to know. But his stated reason on Wednesday for likely pulling the plug on future investments — that the IPO window closes the door on this kind of deal — is hard to square with how late-stage private investing actually works. What’s looking more probable is that this is an exit from a situation that has gotten really complicated, really fast.
