Nvidia boss insists ‘huge’ investment in OpenAI on track

Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has insisted the US tech giant will make a “huge” investment in OpenAI and dismissed as “nonsense” reports that he is unhappy with the generative AI star.

Huang made the remarks late Saturday in Taipei after the Wall Street Journal reported that Nvidia’s plan to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI had been put on ice.

Nvidia announced the plan in September to invest $100 billion in OpenAI, building infrastructure for next-generation artificial intelligence.

The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed sources, said some people inside Nvidia had expressed doubts about the deal and that the two sides were rethinking the partnership.

“That’s complete nonsense. We are going to make a huge investment in OpenAI,” Huang told journalists, when asked about reports that he was unhappy with OpenAI.

Huang insisted that Nvidia was going ahead with its investment in OpenAI, describing it as “one of the most consequential companies of our time”.

“Sam is closing the round, and we will absolutely be involved in the round,” Huang said, referring to OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman.

“We will invest a great deal of money, probably the largest investment we’ve ever made.”

Nvidia has come to dominate spending on the processors needed for training and operating the large language models (LLM) behind chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google Gemini.

Sales of its graphics processing units (GPUs) — originally developed for 3D gaming — powered the company’s market cap to over $5 trillion in October, although the figure has since fallen back by more than $600 billion.

LLM developers like OpenAI are directing much of the mammoth investment they have received into Nvidia’s products, rushing to build GPU-stuffed data centres to serve an anticipated flood of demand for AI services.