Nvidia pulls back from OpenAI and Anthropic: what Jensen Huang is hiding

Jensen Huang has a gift for turning business decisions into theatrical gestures. On Wednesday, the head of Nvidia announced that his company's investments in OpenAI and Anthropic will likely be the last. It sounds like a radical shift for a company that was actively investing in major players in generative artificial intelligence just recently. But the explanation Huang offered the public raises far more questions than it answers.

On the surface, Nvidia's position looks logical. The company is the dominant supplier of graphics processors for the artificial intelligence industry — its H100 and B200 series chips form the backbone of the computational infrastructure for virtually every major AI lab in the world. When you simultaneously sell weapons to all sides and own stakes in some of them, a conflict of interest becomes not theoretical but quite tangible. Clients like Google, Meta, and Microsoft might reasonably ask: are OpenAI and Anthropic receiving preferential access to scarce GPUs precisely because Nvidia is their investor? Withdrawing from direct investments relieves this tension — at least on the surface.

However, the chronology of events raises doubts about whether neutrality is the only reason. Nvidia entered the capital of OpenAI and Anthropic at a time when both companies were conducting large-scale funding rounds, and competition for access to cutting-edge chips was particularly fierce. At that time, the investments looked like a strategic move — a way to strengthen ties with key customers and gain a privileged window into the development of advanced models.

What has changed now? The AI chip market, while still tight, is gradually becoming more competitive. AMD is gaining share, Google is developing its own TPUs, Amazon is pushing Trainium chips, and a whole cohort of startups — from Cerebras to Groq — are offering alternative architectures.

Nvidia still dominates, but its monopoly position is no longer as absolute as it was two years ago.

There is also a regulatory context that Huang preferred not to emphasize. Antitrust regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are increasingly scrutinizing cross-investments in the AI sector. The US Federal Trade Commission has already conducted reviews of Microsoft's investment structure in OpenAI, and the European Commission is tightening its approach to vertical integration in the technology sector. For Nvidia, whose market capitalization exceeds two trillion dollars, even a hint of an antitrust investigation could cost tens of billions in stock value. A preventive exit from investments is less a gesture of good faith than insurance against regulatory risks.

There is also a third, perhaps the most intriguing hypothesis. Nvidia is increasingly developing its own AI competencies that go far beyond chip manufacturing. The company is building a full-cycle platform — from hardware and software to cloud services and ready-made AI solutions for corporate customers. The DGX Cloud service, the Omniverse platform, tools for developing AI agents — all of this puts Nvidia in the position of not just a supplier, but a direct competitor to its former portfolio companies. Investing in those you are about to compete with is bad strategy by any measure.

Market reaction to Huang's statement was muted, which is itself telling. Investors appear to have viewed the news as an expected course correction rather than a sensation. Nvidia's stock barely reacted, suggesting that analysts were already factoring this scenario into their models. For OpenAI and Anthropic, losing Nvidia as an investor is not critical — both companies have attracted sufficient capital from other sources, and business relations through chip purchases will obviously continue.

But the symbolic significance of this move is hard to overstate. Over the past three years, the generative AI ecosystem has been built on a tight interweaving of interests: Microsoft invested in OpenAI, Google in Anthropic, Nvidia in both, Amazon in Anthropic, and so on. This web of mutual investments created a sense of a closed club where a few giants divided the future of technology among themselves. Nvidia's exit from this scheme is the first serious crack in the established structure. If others follow, the industry landscape could change fundamentally.

Jensen Huang has built an empire on his ability to be indispensable to everyone simultaneously. Refusing to invest in AI labs is not a retreat, but a regrouping. Nvidia is betting that selling shovels during a gold rush is more profitable than owning stakes in mines. But when you start digging for gold yourself, neutrality becomes not a principle but a tactic. And that is precisely what Huang preferred to leave between the lines.