Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told attendees at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom conference in San Francisco Wednesday that his company’s investments in OpenAI and Anthropic are likely its last. According to TechCrunch AI, Huang’s stated rationale is straightforward: once both AI labs go public later this year, the window for this kind of private investment closes. Clean, simple, and not entirely convincing.
The Numbers Tell a Different Story
Huang’s IPO-window explanation is hard to square with the actual investment history. Nvidia originally pledged up to $100 billion in OpenAI back in September. The stake it finalized last week, as part of OpenAI’s $110 billion funding round, came in at $30 billion. That’s a significant gap between announcement and delivery, and late-stage private investing doesn’t typically work the way Huang described.
Nvidia’s spokesman, when contacted by TechCrunch AI, pointed to the company’s Q4 earnings call, where Huang described all investments as “focused very squarely, strategically on expanding and deepening our ecosystem reach.” That goal, it seems, has been met.
A Relationship That Got Complicated Fast
The cleaner read here is that Nvidia finds itself holding stakes in two companies now pulling in opposite directions, and the situation escalated quickly.
On the Anthropic front:
- Just two months after Nvidia’s $10 billion investment, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei compared selling high-performance AI chips to approved Chinese customers to “selling nuclear weapons to North Korea”, pointedly aimed at U.S. chip companies, without naming Nvidia directly
- Days ago, the Trump administration blacklisted Anthropic, barring federal agencies and military contractors from using its technology after Anthropic refused to allow its models for autonomous weapons or mass domestic surveillance
On the OpenAI front:
- Hours after Anthropic’s blacklisting, OpenAI announced its own Pentagon deal
- Anthropic called the move “mendacious”
- Within 24 hours, Claude shot to the top of the Apple U.S. App Store free-app rankings, overtaking ChatGPT, a remarkable swing for an app that was outside the top 100 in late January, per Sensor Tower data
What This Means for Nvidia
Nvidia isn’t a passive bystander here. It sells the chips that power both companies. Its earlier investments were strategic ecosystem plays, not pure financial bets. MIT Sloan professor Michael Cusumano captured the circular logic well when Nvidia first announced the OpenAI stake: “Nvidia is investing $100 billion in OpenAI stock, and OpenAI is saying they are going to buy $100 billion or more of Nvidia chips”, effectively “kind of a wash,” as he told the Financial Times.
As the AI industry’s political and competitive fault lines deepen, Nvidia has every incentive to stay neutral. Doubling down on either side of an increasingly polarized battlefield makes no strategic sense for a company whose customers span both camps.
Huang dismissed the idea of bad blood with OpenAI as “nonsense.” But what’s becoming clearer is that this looks less like a planned exit and more like a prudent retreat from a situation that grew complicated far faster than anyone anticipated. Readers can find the full reporting at TechCrunch AI.