Jensen Huang says Nvidia is pulling back from OpenAI and Anthropic
134 points
5 hours ago
| 9 comments
| techcrunch.com
| HN
whynotminot
2 hours ago
[-]
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.

reply
adventured
2 hours ago
[-]
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).
reply
glimshe
7 minutes ago
[-]
The could buy back stock or, God forbid, pay good old dividends to investors instead of throwing money away.
reply
locusofself
1 hour ago
[-]
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?
reply
Kina
1 hour ago
[-]
It did not raise $110 billion. According to their own SEC filings $35 billion of Amazon’s funding is contingent on “(i) OpenAI meeting specified milestones, and (ii) OpenAI directly or indirectly consummating an initial public offering or direct listing of equity securities in the United States”
reply
lelanthran
34 minutes ago
[-]
> 5 billion doesn't look like much when OpenAI just raised $110b though.

Just about all of the AI providers "raises" are a fraction of the reported "raise", like this one.

They didn't "raise" $100b. They got commitments for $35b, with said commitments being dependent on meeting certain criteria.

Every "raise of $FOO" I've seen in the past year or two has not resulted in them getting their hands on $FOO in cash to spend.

reply
codemac
1 hour ago
[-]
> 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?

reply
tl2do
3 hours ago
[-]
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.
reply
wingmanjd
3 hours ago
[-]
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...

reply
PenguinCoder
3 hours ago
[-]
It is insanely stupid that '4B' with a B, is 'too small' of an operating space.
reply
chii
3 hours ago
[-]
The absolute value is irrelevant - it's the opportunity cost that determines this.

It doesn't matter if the consumer market is 4T, if the AI market is 60T!

reply
zmgsabst
33 minutes ago
[-]
“I wouldn’t pick up $20 if there was $100 on the ground!”

Most people would pick up both.

These economic proclamations don’t seem to make sense, when applied to different contexts — which suggests what you’re saying might be folk wisdom rather than sound theory (and greatly over simplifying the problem).

You’re also discounting ecosystem effects — gaming GPUs driving demand for datacenter and workstation GPUs as hobbyist experimentation turns into industrial usage. We don’t know what would happen if nVidia stopped suppressing the GPU market, because it’s never been tried — nVidia has always viciously undercut their own grassroots.

reply
reppap
20 minutes ago
[-]
The problem is that Nvidia cannot make infinite amounts of chips so they actually can't pick up both.
reply
SirMaster
2 hours ago
[-]
But so many gamers want to buy GPUs and can’t because they are sold out or won’t because they are super price inflated. Wouldn’t the gaming market be larger if the products were actually available and at their actual MSRP?
reply
danpalmer
1 hour ago
[-]
Nvidia can't sell 10x the number of GPUs they sell. As much as the supply issues are discussed, it would likely take them a long time to just double the market. They could try to become the vendor of choice for the PS6/next xbox, but that's a big strategy shift for again maybe double the market, not 10x the market.

On the other hand right now the market doesn't seem to think that the >60bn of datacenter revenue is going away or even going to slow down _growing_ any time soon. Just adding 10% more revenue there is worth more than doubling their GPU business which they likely can't do.

reply
satvikpendem
1 hour ago
[-]
No. Enterprise customers generate vastly more revenue and profit than consumers can.
reply
yndoendo
3 hours ago
[-]
That is not substantiable. AI bubble is wealthy hype like a single drop of blood can be used to validate 100 different diagnostic test. Reality is parts per million fails this along with reusable medium. Wealth latches to idiocy.

Gaming and CAD market are real expectations that latch to reality. Grow the education systems and grow both. So is matrix math, such as hashing.

AI has reached a state of software issue, not hardware. And the divergence of AI hardware does not equate to CAD and Gaming math.

reply
SR2Z
3 hours ago
[-]
How many of the last ten years have had some kind of "temporary" GPU shortage? It was crypto, now it's LLMs, who knows what's next?

The only winning strategy for these guys is to exploit the market for all it's worth during shortages and carefully control production to manage the inevitable gluts.

reply
TheDong
2 hours ago
[-]
> AI has reached a state of software issue, not hardware

Citation very much needed.

At the very least, OpenAI seems to believe more and larger datacenters is the path to better models... and they've been right about that every time so far.

reply
eitally
2 hours ago
[-]
Moreover, all the frontier labs and hyperscalers are capacity constrained, and will be for the foreseeable future.
reply
leptons
41 minutes ago
[-]
>OpenAI seems to believe more and larger datacenters is the path to better models...

Does that mean they produce better slop, or more slop faster?

reply
dylan604
2 hours ago
[-]
Great, when the AI bubble bursts, they can repackage their AI chips into consumer cards! /s
reply
eitally
2 hours ago
[-]
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."
reply
returnInfinity
3 hours ago
[-]
And why should a business do that? Limited chip production capacity be spent on most profitable ventures.
reply
blitzar
25 minutes ago
[-]
You saying they should have gone all in on Crypto mining?
reply
bigstrat2003
2 hours ago
[-]
If I were Nvidia, I would give more attention to consumer GPUs to hedge my bets. When (not if) this AI bubble pops, their AI customers will become worthless to them very quickly as they won't be buying more GPUs. And when that day comes, I would want to still have consumers to sell to, rather than have them all buying from AMD because I ignored them.
reply
tl2do
3 hours ago
[-]
I should admit this is partly my personal preference. That said, gaming has been a durable market for decades, and there’s a strong cycle where better chips enable better games, which then drives more demand for better chips.
reply
ravst3s
3 hours ago
[-]
That same virtuous cycle works for their data center segment

Every GW of Blackwell generates more revenue than the entire gaming business does in 1 year.

reply
chii
3 hours ago
[-]
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.
reply
reilly3000
2 hours ago
[-]
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.
reply
Shitty-kitty
1 hour ago
[-]
Nvidia designs chips, it has no production capabilities. Most of their chips are produced by TSMC and memory come from SK Hynix.
reply
dev_l1x_be
38 minutes ago
[-]
Their model offerings are also need some love.
reply
01100011
3 hours ago
[-]
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.
reply
y1n0
3 hours ago
[-]
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?
reply
eitally
2 hours ago
[-]
They don't, not directly. That's why they've generally been winding down DGX Cloud. However, lots of folks dramatically underestimate their frontier models (Nemotron family), and they license those models (free) for embedding in MANY other, large tech companies' own products and platforms, which either directly or indirectly consume massive quantities of GPU time.

Nvidia is best known for selling huge volumes of GPUs to the hyperscalers & neoclouds, but I don't think lots of folks appreciate how many GPUs ISVs like Snowflake, Databricks, Teradata, etc consume, too, just by virtue of designing much of their internal products around CUDA & Nemotron.

reply
mlyle
3 hours ago
[-]
If those customers end up profitable, it could be tempting for nVidia to vertically integrate.

I don't think it's as easy as others say, though.

reply
estimator7292
1 hour ago
[-]
Presumably Nvidia would have a significant advantage on hardware costs, and could run custom hardware that the rest of the market will never see
reply
creddit
3 hours ago
[-]
They don't have the talent.
reply
iso-logi
2 hours ago
[-]
Are you suggesting Nvidia doesn't have talent in the AI industry?

NVIDIA has released NVIDIA Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) and a Frame Generation model, NVIDIA Super Resolution (VSR) being the most popular/well known models. (DLSS is outstanding technology, despite the sometimes misleading marketing).

Nvidia has released countless models:

Alpamayo 1 (Car navigation model) Cosmos-Reason2 (reasoning vision language model) Nemotron 3 (Large Language Model series) Llama-Nemotron (Large Language Model series) Isaac GR00T (VLA Models) Nemotron OCR (Optical Character Recognition models)

Take a look at their HuggingFace Collections, almost 100 different collections with countless models inside each collection: https://huggingface.co/nvidia/collections

reply
__patchbit__
1 hour ago
[-]
> Are you suggesting Nvidia doesn't have talent in the AI industry?

nVidia has an open position for system architect, orbital station AI datacenter

reply
blitzar
23 minutes ago
[-]
Sounds like you get to sit on the roof all day looking up.
reply
rl3
2 hours ago
[-]
NV has a massive amount of AI talent, and a lot of them have PhDs.

Are you suggesting they're lacking on the ultra-high-end? That is: 5-10M+ in comp to sign a single researcher/IC; industry rock star territory.

Major frontier AI labs do tend to have that type of talent in abundance. I'm sure NV has the equivalent when it comes to hardware design. Surely in AI research too, but perhaps not in the same quantities.

reply
LarsDu88
2 hours ago
[-]
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.

reply
paradoxyl
2 hours ago
[-]
And maybe TSMC should make cellphones? If you're higher up the supply chain why go downstream into risk? It's financially irresponsible.
reply
stackghost
1 hour ago
[-]
> If you're higher up the supply chain why go downstream into risk? It's financially irresponsible.

Well, classically, to capture more margin for yourself. In business school they call this Vertical Integration. Samsung did exactly this. AWS too.

reply
wood_spirit
3 hours ago
[-]
And they have a moat - they can control the quantity and quality of hardware flowing to their competitions?
reply
dmix
3 hours ago
[-]
A better headline:

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

reply
SamDc73
3 hours ago
[-]
The Stargate money didn’t show up I guess, and now the whole gridlock is collapsing?
reply
samrus
1 hour ago
[-]
Perfectly reasonable from Nvidia's side. But now thats one less way for sal altman to engineer the valuation upwards
reply
SpicyLemonZest
16 minutes ago
[-]
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?
reply
feverzsj
50 minutes ago
[-]
Everyone knows the bubble is bursting.
reply