OpenAI and Nvidia have had a tense relationship as of late. OpenAI is reportedly not very happy with Nvidia’s GPUs, and Nvidia’s plan to invest $100 billion in the company has stalled. Recently, in an interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom conference, he announced that OpenAI would instead be getting $30 billion.
He said: “So recently, there was a question about ‘are we going to invest $100 billion in OpenAI?’ Just for everybody’s update, we finalized our agreement. We’re going to invest $30 billion in OpenAI. I think the opportunity to invest $100 billion in OpenAI is probably not in the cards.”
The reasoning he gives here is that OpenAI is going public and he believes “the revenues will more than follow” if OpenAI continues to get computer power from Nvidia. He says, “This might be the last time we’ll have the opportunity to invest in a consequential company like this.”
That investment is one that would give Nvidia some ownership, but the partnership with Nvidia to buy its stock will also benefit the gaming company long-term. Effectively, Nvidia doesn’t need to invest more as it doesn’t have to.
On that same note, Nvidia said: “Our $10 billion investment in Anthropic probably will be the last as well.” Huang goes on to talk about Nvidia’s role in the AI boom, adding, “We expanded OpenAI’s reach of capacity to AWS. We’re ramping AWS like mad. We’re ramping them as hard as we can so that OpenAI has accessed even more capacity.”
$30 billion is still a lot of money, though less than a third of the investment round OpenAI announced just over a week ago. Nvidia is the most valuable company in the world thanks to its efforts in the rapid growth of AI, and that growth is what’s stopping you from buying memory at a reasonable price.
This is to say, even if Nvidia isn’t investing as much as one thought it would just a little while ago, the AI industry shows no sign of slowing down. Nvidia has also taken a pretty wide swing, when it comes to which companies it is throwing its support behind; it wouldn’t invest so much cash if it didn’t think it would get it back.
