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At the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom conference in downtown San Francisco Wednesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said his company\u2019s recent investments in OpenAI and Anthropic are likely to be its last in both, saying that once they go public, the opportunity to invest in a \u201cconsequential company like this\u201d closes.<\/p>\n
It could be that simple. While firms sometimes pile into companies until practically the eve of their public debut<\/a> in search of more upside, Nvidia is minting money selling the chips that power both companies \u2014 it\u2019s not like it needs to goose its returns by pouring even more money into either one. <\/p>\n Asked for comment earlier today following Huang\u2019s remarks, a spokesman pointed TechCrunch to a transcript from Nvidia\u2019s fourth-quarter earnings call, where Huang said all of Nvidia\u2019s investments are \u201cfocused very squarely, strategically on expanding and deepening our ecosystem reach\u201d \u2014 which it has presumably already accomplished with its earlier stakes in both companies. <\/p>\n Still, a few other dynamics might also explain the pullback. Industry watchers have repeatedly flagged that investing heavily in your own biggest customers creates circular, conflicted arrangements that could have negative downstream effects. 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 \u201ckind of a wash<\/a>,\u201d observing that \u201cNvidia is investing $100 billion in OpenAI stock and OpenAI is saying they are going to buy $100 billion or more of Nvidia chips.\u201d <\/p>\n That circular logic may help explain why Nvidia ultimately pared back that commitment. The investment it finalized just last week, as part of a $110 billion round, came in at $30 billion<\/a> \u2014 well short of the $100 billion it had once pledged. On Wednesday, Huang acknowledged as much, saying investing the full amount is \u201cprobably not in the cards.\u201d Some have posited that bad blood between the two companies could also be a factor, a suggestion Huang has called \u201cnonsense<\/a>.\u201d Whatever the case, Nvidia\u2019s relationship with Anthropic has looked fraught in its own right.<\/p>\n Just two months after Nvidia announced a $10 billion<\/a> investment in November alongside a \u201cdeep technology partnership\u201d with 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 \u201cselling nuclear weapons to North Korea<\/a>.\u201d (Those chip companies are Nvidia and AMD.)<\/p>\n It\u2019s also worth noting what else happened this week. Huang\u2019s comments come just days after the Trump administration blacklisted<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco, CA<\/span> Within hours of that announcement, OpenAI struck its own deal with the Pentagon \u2014 a move Anthropic has called \u201cmendacious<\/a>\u201d and the public appears to have viewed similarly. Within 24 hours, Claude had shot to the top<\/a> of Apple\u2019s U.S. App Store, overtaking ChatGPT. (At the end of January, Anthropic was outside the top 100, according to Sensor Tower data<\/a>.) <\/p>\n Where that leaves Nvidia is holding stakes in two companies that, at this particular moment, are pulling in very different directions \u2014 one newly aligned with the Defense Department, and the other blacklisted by it. <\/p>\n Whether Huang saw any of this coming, given Nvidia\u2019s web of partnerships, is impossible to know. But his stated reason on Wednesday for likely pulling the plug on future investments \u2014 that the IPO window closes the door on this kind of deal \u2014 is hard to square with how late-stage private investing actually works.<\/p>\n What\u2019s looking more probable, given everything that\u2019s unfolded in recent days, is that this is an exit from a situation that has gotten really complicated, really fast.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n