Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said the chipmaker would be keen to invest in a future initial public offering by OpenAI, underlining the strategic importance of the AI startup to Nvidia’s long-term growth plans and playing down speculation of friction between the two companies.
Speaking on CNBC’s Mad Money on Tuesday, Huang described talk of discord between Nvidia and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as unfounded.
“There’s no drama,” Huang said, pushing back against recent media reports that suggested unease around Nvidia’s planned investment in the AI firm.
“The first deal is on,” Huang said, referring to Nvidia’s September agreement with OpenAI, under which the chipmaker said it planned to invest up to $100 billion as part of a broader effort to build massive computing capacity for the startup. Looking further ahead, Huang added, “And then there’s, of course, an IPO in the future. We’d love to be participating in that as well.”
He described OpenAI as a “once in a generation company” and said Nvidia was “delighted to invest in it,” framing the relationship as a cornerstone of the current AI boom.
His comments reinforce Nvidia’s position not just as a supplier of chips, but as a financial backer of the companies driving demand for its hardware.
The remarks come against a backdrop of reports questioning the depth and stability of the Nvidia–OpenAI relationship. The Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend that Nvidia’s proposed investment had sparked internal debate, with some executives raising concerns about the size and structure of the deal. Separately, Reuters reported on Tuesday that OpenAI had expressed dissatisfaction with certain newer Nvidia chips and had explored alternative hardware options since last year, citing people familiar with the matter.
Huang has moved quickly to dismiss such claims. Speaking to reporters in Taipei on Saturday, he called suggestions of dissatisfaction “nonsense,” reiterating that Nvidia remains fully committed.
“We will invest a great deal of money, probably the largest investment we’ve ever made,” he said.
Altman has also publicly rejected the idea of tension. In a post on X on Tuesday, he said OpenAI values its relationship with Nvidia and intends to remain a major customer.
“We love working with NVIDIA and they make the best AI chips in the world,” Altman wrote. “We hope to be a gigantic customer for a very long time. I don’t get where all this insanity is coming from.”
OpenAI is one of Nvidia’s most important customers, relying heavily on its GPUs to train and run large language models such as ChatGPT. That dependence has helped propel Nvidia into the center of a global AI infrastructure buildout, with governments and corporations racing to secure computing power. Nvidia’s revenue surge over the past two years has been closely tied to this demand.
While OpenAI has not announced formal plans for an IPO, persistent speculation reflects the scale of its capital needs. Training frontier AI models requires vast investments in chips, data centers, and energy, and even with backing from partners such as Microsoft, OpenAI is expected to require repeated funding rounds or a public listing to sustain its growth trajectory.
The broader context is an AI spending boom that has caught even seasoned investors off guard. In January, “Big Short” investor Michael Burry wrote on Substack that he was surprised by how quickly ChatGPT had triggered what he described as a “multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure race.” He likened it to a world where a prototype robot is unveiled and “every business in the world” suddenly starts investing in a robot-driven future.
Huang’s comments suggest Nvidia wants to remain deeply embedded in that future, not only by selling the chips that power AI systems, but also by holding equity stakes in the companies shaping the technology. An eventual OpenAI IPO, if it happens, would likely rank among the most anticipated public offerings in tech history, and Nvidia’s interest signals how intertwined the fortunes of the chipmaker and the AI pioneer have become.
