Nvidia’s Jensen Huang admits he erred in not backing OpenAI, Anthropic early on

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has spoken openly about missing early investment opportunities with OpenAI and Anthropic, during a podcast with host Dwarkesh Patel.

Huang described the situation as his “miss” and a “mistake”.

“At the time, I didn't deeply internalise how difficult it would be to build a foundation AI lab like OpenAI and Anthropic, and the fact that they needed huge investments from the supplier themselves,” he said.


The Nvidia CEO explained that his company was not in a position to commit multi-billion-dollar investments into AI labs such as Anthropic at the time. In contrast, hyperscalers, including Google and Amazon Web Services, were able to step in early with large funding commitments, which in turn ensured that companies such as Anthropic relied on their computing infrastructure.

“I didn't deeply internalise that they really had no other options; that a VC would never put in $5-10 billion of investment into an AI lab with the hopes of it turning out to be Anthropic. So, that was my miss,” he acknowledged. “But I'm not going to make that same mistake again.”

Despite admitting the oversight, Huang said the situation highlighted the foresight of those who structured such deals.

“What OpenAI wanted to do couldn't have been done through VCs. I recognise that now,” said Huang. “But that's their genius. That's why they're smart. They realised then that they had to do something like that. And I'm delighted that they did.”

Huang added that once Nvidia was in a stronger position financially, he was willing to invest when both OpenAI and Anthropic later approached the company. And did.

Now the world’s most valuable company, Nvidia has been backing a wide range of businesses across the AI ecosystem.

In November, the GPU maker committed up to $10 billion to Anthropic to support the development of its Claude model. Earlier, in February, it also announced a $30 billion investment in OpenAI.