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As long as both companies remain stable and viable, there's probably limited upside to pouring more money into them. If they fail, and bring down the AI ecosystem with them, that is very bad news for Nvidia. So they've been there nurturing their success and providing capital to backstop their exponential growth.

You can see Nvidia stepping in throughout the ecosystem with confidence boosting investments where needed. They haven't just supported Anthropic and OpenAI.

If OpenAI and Anthropic succeed, and get their business fly-wheels fully spinning, they don't necessarily need more capital from Huang. Ultimately the goal of Nvidia is to profit from their long-term success by selling them GPUs for a long, long time. The goal isn't to keep plowing money into them forever.

These days Nvidia has more money than it knows what to do with. They could certainly push $5b+ into each company annually and never miss it. They're tracking toward an astounding $200b in operating income (maybe over the next four quarters if the music doesn't suddenly stop).
They could buy back stock or, God forbid, pay good old dividends to investors instead of throwing money away.
5 billion doesn't look like much when OpenAI just raised $110b though. And how sustainable is NVDA's immense profits if this bubble actually bursts?
Agreed. I will add NV has product dominance - they don’t need to buy strategic MFN supplier status - why not deploy capital elsewhere?
> Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said his company’s recent investments in OpenAI and Anthropic are likely to be its last in both, saying that once they go public as anticipated later this year, the opportunity to invest closes

ok, sounds obvious

> Nvidia, for its part, isn’t offering much more on the matter

ok, so no more news from nvidia

> Still, a few other dynamics might also explain the pullback..

Wait it's a pullback?

This is terrible reporting, right?

Almost all reporting is terrible. But yes, this is terrible reporting.
The next round is IPO for both companies. I don't know why the headline is written like that.

Super click baity.

This is several investment rounds in so I think it might be fair to say it's a pullback.
Instead of pouring more money into OpenAI and Anthropic, Nvidia should invest more in expanding production capacity for the RTX 5000 series and future generations. High-end consumer GPU availability is still constrained, especially for the RTX 5090, and street prices remain elevated. Nvidia should come back to the consumer side.
Datacenter income for nVidia last quarter was something like 62B vs the gaming market of <4B. While not quite a rounding error, it feels like the gaming market is just too small for them to put more resources toward it for us consumer folks.

https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financia...

It is insanely stupid that '4B' with a B, is 'too small' of an operating space.
Why would they do that? They launched the DGX Spark last year with multiple hardware OEMs selling flavors of the reference device (Dell, Lenovo, Asus). That contains a desktop-sized Grace Blackwell architecture GPU (GB10), and word on the street is that they're moving into laptops this year. Their market is the same market Apple is pitching the MacBook 5 Pro/Max, too: devs wanting local models. It's not currently a large market, but it's growing quickly. It makes far more sense for Nvidia to build hardware to service this market than to overly focus on their gaming lines. RTX GPUs are sell once. GB-containing consumer devices are "sell once, but then collect recurring revenue when the workloads those developers build hit production on a cloud somewhere."
And why should a business do that? Limited chip production capacity be spent on most profitable ventures.
> Nvidia should invest more in expanding production capacity

Not if they expect build out of AI data centers to slow down. Once both OpenAI and Anthropic goes public there's going to be a pressure on them to either turn a profit or at least have the stock price go up. One way that can happen, if subscriptions, government contracts and ads aren't working, is cutting back on cost. Cutting costs means doing more with the existing GPUs and datacenters and running them for longer.

Even if the both companies can turn a profit, there's going to be a pressure to not spend on datacenters, if existing facilities can be pushed harder or used more efficiently.

OpenAI and Anthropic going public is going to mean reduced spend on datacenters and GPUs.

nvidia will come back to the consumer side when the AI side stops being as profitable. Right now, it still seems like the margins for AI hardware is way higher than the same consumer product would sell for.
This leaves an opening for Intel to get in the game. Their new lines have a pretty decent value proposition for mid-tier gaming. If they focused on the higher end they would could own it. There is massive latent demand because of the NVidia situation. It’s easier to make money from than the R&D to build the next Blackwell but there is just as much demand for local/private models on the prosumer level.
Fabs are expensive, take decades to make and most important are very hard.
Nvidia designs chips, it has no production capabilities. Most of their chips are produced by TSMC and memory come from SK Hynix.
No problem with that, even if it takes force.
Their model offerings are also need some love.
Nvidia could flip a switch and start competing with former customers. They have the talent, the models, the HW, and they know how to quickly build out DCs.
That would not go well for nvidia. Why would they want to enter and compete in a market where everybody is losing money? And in so doing alienate the people that make them profitable?
And maybe TSMC should make cellphones? If you're higher up the supply chain why go downstream into risk? It's financially irresponsible.
They don't have the talent.
That's not how a smart business runs and that's now how Nvidia operates.

Jensen is smart. He's gone through over 30 years of tech cycles.

Nvidia actively commoditizes the LLM models. Look at Nemotron. They've avoided making a SOTA model solely to keep the hyperscalers (aka crack addicts) coming back for more GPUs.

As soon as the bubble bursts, they can release some open weight NemoMambaDiffusiontron and keep folks buying GPUs to run the damn thing.

It still wouldn't be smart to do so, as this would fall into the common business pitfall of thinking you could easily do the next stack layer of work.

And they have a moat - they can control the quantity and quality of hardware flowing to their competitions?
Competing with your own customers is not a good idea, especially before the bubble pops.
A better headline:

Nvidia rushed some investments in both companies just before they went public and are now are just waiting to get paid.

I don't really understand the idea that not investing more money is a "pullback". Have VC norms propagated so far that any company that makes any investment is presumed to be interested in repeated future rounds?
The Stargate money didn’t show up I guess, and now the whole gridlock is collapsing?
Blogspam derived from the original article by CNBC, with clickbait title.

> [subtitle] Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the company’s recent $30 billion investment in OpenAI “might be the last time” it invests in the AI startup as it gears up to go public.

Jensen meant he expects no more rounds before IPO.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/04/nvidia-huang-openai-investme...

I think it is likely that they realize that LLM models will be able to be developed by many companies, and I see most early, heavy adopters of LLMs doing the math on giving OpenAI/Anthropic token fees versus just having in-house models, and realizing that, at this point, it sure seems like having your own models might be the future path.

Nvidia is in position, and has the resources, to see this with a much broader lens, and realizes OpenAI/Anthropic won't be able to corner the market and the long term play is to sell GPUs to cloud providers and companies themselves.

The article already explains why, both of the companies have taken a huge amount of capital so further investing doesn't make sense and they will both go public soon where they will raise more.

Both companies will need Nvidia products regardless if Nvidia puts capital into the companies. So this is not 'pulling back' as the headline says.

Nvidia sells chips to whoever wins, so investing in a specific lab creates downside with no real upside. The more interesting read is whether Huang sees model providers compressing toward commodity pricing. I wrote about why that layer is structurally squeezed: https://philippdubach.com/posts/is-ai-really-eating-the-worl...
My bet is Nvidia is using massive AI ability to dictate its investments. And it logically predict that not much (more) investments are needed and it need time to become profitable.

That a signal that nobody should invest more in the IA big companies and now they MUST become profitable soon.

Or it predicted that they will crash, so they'd better be out before everyone else realizes.
OpenAI and Anthropic are better off with cerebras rather than nvidia
That reads more as an image move. Better of they can position themselves as a provider of neutral tools and stay far away from the DoW discussion on use of said tools
Perfectly reasonable from Nvidia's side. But now thats one less way for sal altman to engineer the valuation upwards
After seeing natural gas prices spike like that I'd probably pull out of such an energy intensive investment too
The important news is that OpenAI and Anthropic are pulling out from NVidia; they are not public companies.
If this AI bubble pops we'll just have a ton of cheap powerful GPUs on the market and possibly even an uptick in job growth in tech.
Everyone knows the bubble is bursting.
Everybody knows that the boat is sinking.