Nvidia CEO Huang says $30 billion OpenAI investment ‘might be the last’
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the company’s recent $30 billion investment in OpenAI “could be its last investment” in the AI startup before it goes public near the end of the year.
Huang said the opportunity to invest $100 billion in OpenAI, a figure the two companies floated as part of a massive infrastructure deal in September, was probably “not in the cards.”
“That’s because they’re going public,” Huang said during the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference on Wednesday.
He also noted that Nvidia’s $10 billion investment in OpenAI rival Anthropic will likely be its last investment. Nvidia had previously shared its plans to invest in Anthropic in an announcement. Microsoft In November.
Huang’s comments come after months of speculation about the scope of Nvidia’s relationship with OpenAI. The chip maker announced in a statement quarterly filing In November, it was reported that the previously announced $100 billion deal might not come to fruition, and the Wall Street Journal reported in January that the deal “on ice“
Nvidia made a similar statement in its quarterly report in February, stating that there was “no assurance” that the company would “sign an investment and partnership agreement with OpenAI or complete a transaction.”
The chipmaker’s $30 billion investment in OpenAI was announced as part of the $110 billion funding round the startup announced on Friday. The round also included a $50 billion commitment. Amazon and a $30 billion commitment from SoftBank.
As part of the agreement, OpenAI has secured 3 gigawatts of dedicated inference capacity and 2 gigawatts of training capacity on Nvidia’s Vera Rubin systems for its AI data centers, OpenAI said on Friday.
The September deal, which shook up the companies’ tech sector and triggered subsequent infrastructure deals, outlined a structure under which Nvidia would invest in OpenAI over several years while bringing new supercomputing facilities online. Nvidia’s $30 billion investment is not tied to any distribution phase.
The chipmaker has been one of the biggest winners of the AI boom because it produces the graphics processing units, or GPUs, that AI companies need to train models and run large workloads.
Still, AI companies’ needs are shifting from training to inference, a type of processing that enables AI models to quickly respond to user queries, putting some pressure on the company. Nvidia reportedly It is developing a new chip specifically for inference, and OpenAI is expected to be one of the biggest customers of the new processor.
In February, OpenAI announced it would sign up for a major purchase of “private inference capacity” from Nvidia. OpenAI has also invested heavily in Amazon’s inference-optimized chips and also uses Google’s Tensor Processing Units.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman will speak at the Morgan Stanley conference on Thursday, according to a source close to the program who asked not to be named because the details are private.
— CNBC’s Katie Tarasov and Kate Rooney contributed to this report.
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