Jensen Huang Says Nvidia Is Done Investing in OpenAI and Anthropic

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced at the Morgan Stanley conference that the company recent investments in OpenAI and Anthropic will likely be its last. The stated reason: both companies are expected to go public later this year, closing the window for private investment.

But the real dynamics are more complicated. Nvidia finalized a $30 billion stake in OpenAI last week as part of a $110 billion round. That is well below the $100 billion commitment Nvidia originally announced in September. MIT professor Michael Cusumano described these arrangements as "kind of a wash" since OpenAI turns around and buys billions in Nvidia chips.

The relationship with Anthropic looks even more strained. Just two months after Nvidia announced a $10 billion investment, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei compared selling AI chips to certain countries to "selling nuclear weapons to North Korea" at Davos, a thinly veiled shot at Nvidia.

Things escalated further when the Trump administration blacklisted Anthropic over its refusal to allow AI models in autonomous weapons or mass surveillance. OpenAI swooped in with its own Pentagon deal within hours. Amodei has since called OpenAI messaging around the deal "straight up lies."

The public appears to side with Anthropic. Claude shot to the top of the App Store within 24 hours of the Pentagon dispute, overtaking ChatGPT. At the end of January, Claude was outside the top 100.

Nvidia now holds stakes in two companies pulling in opposite directions on one of the most consequential questions in AI: how close should these models get to military and government use. Whether Huang saw this rift coming when he wrote those checks is an open question.