Nvidia is spraying cash around the AI scene rather than picking a winner and sticking to it.
On an episode of the “Dwarkesh” podcast released on Wednesday, Nvidia cofounder Jensen Huang said: “There are so many great, amazing foundation model companies, and we try to invest in all of them. We don’t pick winners. We need to support everyone.”
Huang said there are two reasons for the scattergun approach, starting with the view that picking winners is not Nvidia’s job.
“When Nvidia first started, there were 60 3D graphics companies. If you had taken those 60 graphics companies and asked yourself which one was going to make it, Nvidia would be at the top of that list, not to make it.”
He said: “Everybody would have counted us out. And here we are. So I have enough humility to recognise that. Don’t pick winners.”
Nvidia is now the most valuable company in the world and has piled into businesses across the AI stack and neighbouring bets like biotech, robotics and self-driving.
It holds big stakes in public firms including CoreWeave, Intel, Synopsys and Nokia, which is a broad mix for a company that sells shovels and keeps finding new gold rushes.
The same spread shows up in large language models, where Nvidia has been playing patrons’ club with eye-watering cheques.
In November, Nvidia committed to investing up to $10 billion in Anthropic to develop Claude, then in February, it said it invested $30 billion in OpenAI.
At a March conference appearance, Huang said: “The reason for that is because they’re going to go public.”
Nvidia is invested in French frontier lab Mistral AI and has handed smaller cheques to Wayve, Scale AI and Figure AI as it tries to be on every cap table that might matter.
