Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang says he failed to fully appreciate what it would take to build a frontier AI lab, leaving him and his company on the sidelines as Anthropic soared to a monster valuation.
In a new interview with podcast host Dwarkesh Patel, Huang says Nvidia had the chance to be an early Anthropic investor, but passed on the opportunity.
At the time, Huang says Nvidia was not in the habit of pouring billions of dollars into other companies, including AI startups.
“At the time, I didn’t deeply internalize how difficult it would be to build a foundation AI lab like OpenAI and Anthropic. The fact that they needed huge investments from suppliers themselves. We just weren’t in a position to make the multi-billion-dollar investment into Anthropic so that they could use our compute. But Google and AWS were. And they put in huge investments in the beginning so that Anthropic, in return, used their compute.”
According to Huang, the experience taught him a very valuable lesson.
“I would say my mistake is I didn’t deeply internalize that they really had no other options, that a VC would never put in $5, $10 billion of investment into an AI lab with the hopes of it turning out to be Anthropic. And so that was my miss. But even if I understood it, I don’t think we would have been in a position to do that at the time. But I’m not gonna make that same mistake again.”
In October 2023, Google and Amazon committed to invest up to $6 billion in Anthropic, and the two tech giants have been pouring money into the Claude creator over the past few years.
As of early 2026, Google owns a 14% stake in Anthropic. The Claude maker is currently valued at $380 billion, indicating that Google’s investment is worth about $53.2 billion.
Meanwhile, Amazon’s $8 billion investment in Anthropic is now worth $60.6 billion.
Anthropic is widely anticipated to make a blockbuster IPO this year.
Disclaimer: Opinions expressed at CapitalAI Daily are not investment advice. Investors should do their own due diligence before making any decisions involving securities, cryptocurrencies, or digital assets. Your transfers and trades are at your own risk, and any losses you may incur are your responsibility. CapitalAI Daily does not recommend the buying or selling of any assets, nor is CapitalAI Daily an investment advisor. See our Editorial Standards and Terms of Use.