Jensen Huang says Nvidia invests in a lot of tech companies, instead of selecting a handful, for a reason.
“There are so many great, amazing foundation model companies, and we try to invest in all of them,” he said on an episode of the “Dwarkesh” podcast released on Wednesday. “We don’t pick winners. We need to support everyone.”
Huang, who cofounded Nvidia in 1993, said that there were two reasons behind this. One, he said its not Nvidia’s job to pick winners. Two, the company’s history is a lesson.
“When Nvidia first started, there were 60 3D graphics companies,” Huang said. “If you would have 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 that at the time, the company’s graphics architecture didn’t look promising.
“Everybody would have counted us out,” he said. “And here we are. So I have enough humility to recognize that. Don’t pick winners.”
Nvidia, which is the most valuable company in the world, has heavily invested in companies across the AI stack and related industries, including biotech, robotics, and self-driving. The chipmaker has big stakes in public companies, including CoreWeave, Intel, Synopsys, and Nokia.
Nvidia has also cast its bets wide in the large language model space.
In November, Nvidia committed to investing up to $10 billion in Anthropic to develop Claude. In February, the company announced it invested $30 billion in OpenAI.
In a March conference appearance, Huang said that the investments are likely to be Nvidia’s last in the two private companies.
“The reason for that is because they’re going to go public,” Huang said.
Nvidia is also invested in French frontier lab Mistral AI.
The tech giant has also cut smaller checks to startups such as autonomous driving company Wayve, data labeling firm Scale AI, and Figure AI, which is building humanoid robotics.
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