Nvidia says its huge investments in OpenAI and Anthropic were the last
Nvidia’s latest comments suggest its financial ties with major AI developers are entering a new phase. Speaking at the Morgan Stanley Tech, Media & Telecom conference, CEO Jensen Huang indicated that Nvidia’s earlier investments in leading AI firms such as OpenAI and Anthropic are likely to be its last. According to Huang, their anticipated public listings will mark a natural endpoint for such strategic stakes.
While Huang’s explanation was brief, it highlights the unusual position Nvidia now occupies in the AI ecosystem. The company supplies the chips that power much of the world’s generative AI infrastructure while also holding financial interests in some of the software companies that rely on that hardware. Initially, those relationships appeared mutually beneficial: Nvidia gained reliable customers for its GPUs, while AI developers secured access to critical computing resources.
Nvidia declined to expand on Huang’s remarks beyond prior statements. A company spokesperson referred reporters to comments from the firm’s fourth-quarter earnings call, where Huang described Nvidia’s venture investments as focused on “expanding and deepening” its broader ecosystem. From that perspective, the company’s stakes in OpenAI and Anthropic already served their intended purpose, helping cement both companies as major users of Nvidia chips.
However, the partnerships have begun to draw scrutiny. Observers have questioned whether large cross-investments between AI infrastructure providers and AI startups risk creating a circular flow of capital that inflates valuations across the sector. Those concerns intensified last September when Nvidia considered investing up to $100 billion in OpenAI, a move that some analysts saw as reinforcing an already self-referential funding cycle.
When OpenAI finalized its $110 billion funding round last week, Nvidia ultimately contributed around $30 billion, far less than initially suggested. Market analysts interpreted the scaled-down investment as a sign that Nvidia may be stepping back from such financial entanglements rather than facing a capital shortage.
The company’s relationship with Anthropic has been even more complicated. In November, Nvidia committed roughly $10 billion to the developer of the Claude AI models as part of a broader multi-cloud collaboration involving both Google and Microsoft. Yet tensions soon surfaced. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei sharply criticized U.S. chipmakers for selling advanced AI hardware to Chinese buyers.
