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

At the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecommunications Conference in downtown San Francisco on Wednesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said his company’s recent investments in OpenAI and Anthropic would likely be the last in both, saying that once they go public, the opportunity to invest in “an important company like this closes.”

It could be that simple. While companies are sometimes crowded into even companies On the eve of their public appearance Looking for more upside, Nvidia is raising money selling the chips that power both companies — it’s not as if it needs to boost its revenues by pumping more money into either.

When asked for comment earlier today following Huang’s remarks, a TechCrunch spokesperson pointed to a transcript of Nvidia’s fourth-quarter earnings call, where Huang said all of Nvidia’s investments are “directly and strategically focused on expanding and deepening the reach of our ecosystem,” — something it has presumably already accomplished with its previous stakes in both companies.

However, some other dynamics may explain this decline, including the circular nature of these arrangements themselves. When Nvidia first announced it would invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI last September, Michael Cusumano, a professor at MIT Sloan, kindly described it to the Financial Times as “Kind of laundry“, noting that “Nvidia is investing $100 billion in OpenAI stock, and OpenAI says it will buy $100 billion or more of Nvidia chips.”

This could explain why commitment has diminished. Nvidia’s investment was completed just last week as part of OpenAI’s $110 billion round 30 billion dollars — far less than the $100 billion it once pledged. (On Wednesday, Hwang acknowledged as much, saying that investing the full amount was “probably not out of the question.”) Some have theorized that corrupt relations between the two companies could also be a factor, a suggestion Hwang described as “prattleWhatever the case, Nvidia’s relationship with Anthropic seemed fraught in itself.

Just two months after Nvidia announced… 10 billion dollars Investing in November alongside a “deep tech partnership” with Anthropic, CEO Dario Amodei took the stage in Davos and, without naming Nvidia directly, compared the work of US chip companies selling high-performance AI processors to established Chinese customers to “Selling nuclear weapons to North Korea(Those chip companies are Nvidia and AMD.)

It is also worth noting what else happened. Huang’s comments come just days into the Trump administration black list Humanitarian, barring federal agencies and military contractors from using its technology after the company refused to allow its models to be used in autonomous weapons or mass domestic surveillance.

Within hours of that announcement, OpenAI entered into its own agreement with the Pentagon — a move Anthropic described as “liar“The public seemed to see the same thing. Within 24 hours, Claude did just that.” Fire to the top From the Apple App Store in the US, bypassing ChatGPT. (At the end of January, Anthropic was outside the top 100 companies, according to… Sensor tower data.)

That leaves Nvidia owning stakes in two companies that, at this particular moment, are headed in two very different directions — one newly allied with the Department of Defense, the other blacklisted by it.

It’s impossible to know if Huang saw any of this coming, given Nvidia’s network of partnerships. But the reason he announced Wednesday for possibly halting future investments — that the IPO window closes the door on these kinds of deals — is difficult to reconcile with the way late-stage private investment works. What seems more likely is that this is a way out of a situation that has become really complicated, really fast.