Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says it may not invest further in OpenAI, Anthropic with IPOs on the horizon

NVIDIA Corp (NASDAQ: NVDA) might finally be putting the brakes on some of its investment activity, much of which has raised eyebrows in certain quarters that have highlighted its role as the 'Central Bank of AI', offering financing to, investing in, and also selling to its customers.

Nvidia's CEO, Jensen Huang has indicated that this activity might no longer be in play at Morgan Stanley's Technology, Media, and Telecom ⁠conference earlier today. This comes at a time when both OpenAI and Anthropic are looking to go public later this year, with the former targeting a reported $1 Trillion IPO.

A slew of diverse AI investments

It is important to point out that while Nvidia has invested in multiple AI partners and related industries including CoreWeave Inc (which has since IPOed and trades under the ticker NASDAQ: CRWV), Lumentum Holdings Inc (NASDAQ: LITE) and Coherent Corp. (NYSE: COHR) to name some of the more prominent ones, it has shown more reluctance of late when it comes to investing copious amounts in a single partner.

This is particularly true for OpenAI, which saw Nvidia's CEO backtrack on what many saw as an $100 billion investment in the former before the chip designer ultimately invested $30 billion in what he terms a "consequential company".

Anthropic, which has seen its own share of controversy and praise, took the top spot on Apple's storefront after a very public spat with the United States Department of War that included concerns about fully automated weapons and mass surveillance.

While both OpenAI and Anthropic have reduced guardrails around their offerings, with the former going as far as to remove the word 'safely' from its mission statement, the latter still seems to not be willing to cross certain lines, even when threatened with what are effectively sanctions on its Claude AI model's future deployment in government.

This has, in turn, made it a popular cause to rally around, even as the Pentagon's demand that Claude be available for "all lawful purposes" remains unmet.

An investor to watch

Nvidia itself beat earnings, recording an impressive 73% gain in revenue and nearly doubling its earnings per share versus the same period last year, and has a growing amount of cash at hand, even as it continues to invest somewhat cautiously in what many feel is a somewhat overbought AI industry at this point in time.

However, given that many retail and institutional investors keep a close eye on Nvidia's moves, many of which result in large revaluations of the companies it invests in, it is a welcome investor and a sign of confidence in a company's operations, which often leads them to go out of their way to cater to what is the world's largest company in terms of market cap.