Anthony Ha
Weekend editor at TechCrunch, writing about technology, startups and AI policy.
“Under Huang, the company has invested very, very heavily in a number of AI startups. People talk about the idea of an AI circular economy, and NVIDIA has been one of the biggest players in that. If NVIDIA is going into this stage of lockdown, circle the wagons, even if it just means a small pullback, that could have really dramatic repercussions.”
Equity · Startups & Venture · November 2026
Context
After covering Jensen Huang's resignation, Ha turned to what it means for the wider AI industry. His point is that Nvidia's investments in startups and customers make it a pillar of the AI economy well beyond selling chips.
Transcript
the Bloomberg
…in the last few days following that. And I don't know what role exactly that report played in it, but it seems to be maybe there's a shift within government or within the board, a kind of a dawning realization of kind of the extent to which this had spread just beyond Jensen Huang’s some affair.
Yeah, I think we should, you know, obviously, I mean, there's just the kind of, wow, this is happening. This is like so happened so fast. It's like something that when we recorded, you know, our equity panel discussion a week ago, like there was, again, a little bit of reporting about this, just that this had been a subject of concern. But like, if you told me a week ago that we were going to be talking about Jensen Huang’s resigning, I would have just like my eyes would have widened and I would have been in total shock. So there's that, but there's also just the question of like, what does this mean for NVIDIA? What does this mean for, you know, the broader AI industry? And I think one of the reasons those two things are obviously like very tightly connected is not just NVIDIA chips themselves, but also the fact that under Jensen Huang’s, the company has invested very, very heavily in a number of AI startups. You know, people talk about the idea of an AI circular economy. And I think NVIDIA has been one of the biggest players in that in terms of, you know, both like funding a lot of things, also obviously providing the…
Yeah, that's what I want to know. Like what happens to the bank of NVIDIA without Jensen? Like, is he the one leading this? Right. So like just to throw some numbers at you, NVIDIA apparently accounts for roughly 80% of the AIGP market. It reported $99 billion in investments and another $25 billion…
I think you're right, Rebecca. I think the extent to which the kind of bank of NVIDIA, as you put it, is a Jensen project or not is probably one of the big things that we're going to see coming out of this. Do they keep those level of investments high and do they continue making them? Or is that…
Yeah. And I think that also ties into something that you were saying before, Rebecca, about essentially like there are certain ways in which Jensen Huang’s and NVIDIA behaved that maybe didn't require Chinese spies to push them in certain directions because they have financial incentives to both…
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