Jensen Huang says Nvidia is pulling back from OpenAI and Anthropic, but his explanation raises more questions than it answers

At the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom conference in downtown San Francisco, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Wednesday that his company’s recent investments in OpenAI and Anthropic will likely be the last in both. Once they go public as expected later this year, the opportunity to invest will be gone.

It can be that simple. While companies sometimes pile into companies until practically the eve of their public debut Looking for more upside, Nvidia makes money by selling the chips that power both companies – it’s not like it needs to boost its returns by pouring even more money into either.

Nvidia, for its part, doesn’t offer much elaboration. When asked for comment earlier today following Huang’s comments, a spokesperson pointed TechCrunch to a transcript of the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call, in which Huang said all of Nvidia’s investments are “very squarely and strategically focused on expanding and deepening our ecosystem reach,” a goal that its prior stakes in both companies have arguably met.

However, some other dynamics may also explain the decline, including the circular nature of these arrangements themselves, which have raised questions about a potential bubble. When Nvidia first announced last September that it would invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI, MIT Sloan professor Michael Cusumano bluntly described it to the Financial Times as “a kind of wash,” noting that “Nvidia is investing $100 billion in OpenAI stock, and OpenAI says they will buy $100 billion or more in Nvidia chips.”

That could explain why engagement declined. The investment that Nvidia completed last week as part of OpenAI’s $110 billion round came in $30 billion – far below that previous promise. If there is more to the story, Huang is not saying, having dismissed suggestions of bad blood between the two companies as “nonsense.”

Meanwhile, Nvidia’s relationship with Anthropic seems fraught in itself. Just two months after Nvidia launched a $10 billion In November, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei took the stage at Davos and, without directly naming Nvidia, compared the act of U.S. chip companies selling powerful AI processors to approved Chinese customers to “selling nuclear weapons to North Korea.” (Ouch.)

In retrospect, a comparison of nuclear weapons was the least. Just days before Huang appeared at the banking conference, the Trump administration blacklisted Anthropic, barring federal agencies and military contractors from using the technology after the company refused to allow its models to be used for autonomous weapons or mass domestic surveillance.

Within hours of that announcement, OpenAI struck its own deal with the Pentagon – a move Anthropic has called “mendacious” and the public appears to have thought the same. Within 24 hours, Claude had shot to the top of Apple’s US App Store, overtaking ChatGPT. (At the end of January, Anthropic was according to Sensor tower data.)

Where that remains, Nvidia has stakes in two companies that are pulling in very different directions at this particular moment, potentially dragging customers and partners along for the ride.

Whether Huang saw all this coming, given Nvidia’s web of partnerships, is impossible to know. But the reason he gave Wednesday for likely pulling the plug on future investments — that the IPO window closes the door on these types of deals — is difficult to square with how late-stage private investing actually works. What seems more likely is that this is a way out of a situation that has become very quickly and very complicated.