Nvidia Ends OpenAI, Anthropic Investment Push
Get the Tech newsletter
Daily tech — startups, AI labs, chips, the launches that shape the next decade. Free.
- Jensen Huang said at the Morgan Stanley TMT conference that Nvidia's recent investments in OpenAI and Anthropic are "likely to be its last" in both, because their anticipated IPOs close the investment window
- Nvidia's finalized investment in OpenAI's $110 billion funding round came in at $30 billion — well short of the $100 billion pledge announced last September, reflecting shrinking commitment as bubble concerns mounted
- Michael Cusumano, an MIT Sloan professor, told the FT the Nvidia-OpenAI arrangement was "kind of a wash," noting Nvidia is investing in OpenAI stock while OpenAI commits to buying $100 billion or more of Nvidia chips
- Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei compared U.S. chip companies selling high-performance AI processors to approved Chinese customers to "selling nuclear weapons to North Korea" at Davos, just two months after Nvidia's $10 billion investment in the company
- The Trump administration blacklisted Anthropic days before Huang's remarks, 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
- OpenAI struck its own deal with the Pentagon within hours of the Anthropic blacklisting — a move Anthropic called "mendacious"; within 24 hours, Anthropic's Claude overtook ChatGPT atop the Apple U.S. App Store free-app rankings, having been outside the top 100 at the end of January
- Nvidia's stated IPO-window rationale for the pullback "is hard to square with how late-stage private investing actually works," the analysis concludes — the more probable explanation is an exit from "a situation that has gotten really complicated, really fast"
Why it matters: Nvidia is holding stakes in two AI companies now pulling in opposite directions: Anthropic, just blacklisted by the Trump administration for refusing autonomous-weapons work, and OpenAI, which landed a Pentagon deal Anthropic branded "mendacious." The $100 billion OpenAI pledge already shrank to a $30 billion reality. Huang's clean IPO-window story doesn't match how late-stage investing works, suggesting Nvidia is quietly extracting itself from a partnership web that turned toxic on a very short timeline.
Ask SkimNews
