NVIDIA has emerged as the pillar of artificial intelligence. Its chips are what power the most powerful data centers in the world and it is getting billion-dollar investments to keep the wheel turning. At the same time, it has become one of the largest strategic investors in the artificial intelligence ecosystem. OpenAI seemed to be her best friend, but that’s over.
And Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, makes it clear: the next investments will probably be the last. Also in its great rival.
Of 100,000 million. That was the magical figure we talked about a few months ago. Recreating the “vendor financing” schemes of the dotcom bubble, NVIDIA was going to finance OpenAI with $100 billion. In exchange, OpenAI would Buy NVIDIA chips for the same value. It was a “trap” operation because the company would become the financier of its own premium client.
With such an investment, OpenAI was expected to build data centers that would require between four and five million NVIDIA GPUs: Huang already commented at the time that this represented double the total GPUs they distributed the previous year. In short: an absolute animal. And those 100,000 million were a mega-operation, yes, but one more of the many rounds of financing that the company led by Sam Altman has been raising.
To 30,000 million. But in early February of this year, something unexpected happened. In what seemed like a historic turn, Jensen Huang, cornered by the media after an informal dinner in a restaurant in Taiwan, commented that there was never a 100% commitment to make that mammoth investment.
The CEO of NVIDIA pointed out that they would surely continue making “the largest investment” they have made in their history, but although he did not give a figure, it was clear that nothing more than 100,000 million. How much? Less, much less: 30 billion dollars.
Good luck, OpenAI. Love broke, a love that began when Jensen Huang gave a DGX-1 server to Elon Musk back in 2016. Because it is not just that Jensen has commented that the figure will be around 30 billion, but because he has mentioned that “it could be the last time” that they inject money into OpenAI. And the reason is very clear: “the reason is because they are going public.”
From there, OpenAI will have to change its model completely and will be under the designs of the market.
Big bets. NVIDIA, with this operation, shows that it is taking another course, one in which it prefers not to marry anyone and not commit in a truly serious way to a single company. Of course, OpenAI is not the only big operation that NVIDIA is going to get into.
Another $10 billion is prepared for Anthropic, OpenAI’s great rival both professionally and personally (since Altman and Amodei can’t stand each other). Worse Huang has also mentioned that, again, it will probably also be the last. They are also expected to go public.
Fewer giants, broader base. OpenAI will have 110 billion soon. Apart from NVIDIA’s 30,000, Amazon will inject 50,000 million and SoftBank has committed 30,000 million. Huang has hinted that these two large operations could mark the beginning of a change of course. Instead of operations that can be counted on the fingers of one hand in giants, more investment in smaller companies.
NVIDIA has been investing more modest sums in other AI companies over the years. Model and software companies, infrastructure, robotics and even autonomous driving. It has been turning its GPUs and platforms into the standard on which the entire artificial intelligence industry is based, and perhaps this break with giant companies like OpenAI or Anthropic marks a new beginning in which the focus is on supporting a broader ecosystem of partners.
In this way, you will be able to continue shaping your objective: a range of more or less large companies that scale on your platform.
Image | Steve Juvetson, NVIDIA
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