Nvidia CEO Huang rules out US$100 billion OpenAI investment
Nvidia Corp. chief executive Jensen Huang doesn’t see his company’s investments in OpenAI reaching US$100 billion — the maximum amount that the chipmaking giant had once pledged to spend on the startup.
“I think the opportunity to invest US$100 billion in OpenAI is probably not in the cards,” Huang said at a Morgan Stanley conference in San Francisco Wednesday. He cited OpenAI’s plans to go public, potentially by the end of the year. “So this might be the last time we’ll have the opportunity to invest in a consequential company like this,” Huang said.
Nvidia contributed US$30 billion to a massive US$100 billion funding round for OpenAI last month that valued the ChatGPT creator at US$730 billion. While it was the chipmaker’s largest single bet on a startup to date, the investment fell far below the up to US$100 billion in funding that the company was considering as part of a pact with OpenAI in September.
The smaller-than-anticipated investment stoked concerns about relations between the leading AI company and the world’s dominant chipmaker. But, as recently as Jan. 31, Huang was describing OpenAI’s work as “incredible” and called the firm “one of the most consequential companies of our time.”
OpenAI declined to comment on Huang’s remarks.
Huang said Nvidia’s recent US$10 billion investment in OpenAI rival Anthropic was also probably “the last” one in that company. Anthropic, maker of the Claude AI platform, has similarly laid the groundwork for its own initial public offering.
In his appearance at the conference, Huang went on to address concerns that some investors have expressed about his investments in such companies — and the fears that the use of capital is evidence of a bubble.
He reiterated his argument that the deployment of AI computing is already generating profitable revenue for companies, including large publicly traded operators of data centres such as Microsoft Corp.
If these customers could get more computing power, they’d be growing even quicker, he argued. Having three times the computing capacity would triple their sales, he said.
He also said companies such as Cadence Design Systems Inc. and Synopsys Inc. — two providers of automated design software and computers — will become much bigger and more important in the future. Those remarks briefly lifted the stocks.
And Huang touted his own company’s historic results and said that the industry is only at the beginning of a large growth run.
The comments helped send Nvidia shares up as much as 2.6 per cent in New York trading on Wednesday — even though the company’s latest earnings report previously drew a chilly response from investors.
“We just had the best earnings of earnings in the history of earnings,” he said. “I’m sure somebody had better returns. But anyways, we had a very good quarter. Listen, you can’t hold a stock back.”
—With assistance from Shirin Ghaffary.