Silicon Valley Start-Ups Face a Future Without Jensen Huang’s Money

Detailed summary

Mr. Huang championed start-ups, with Nvidia holding $48 billion worth of stakes in 229 private companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, at the end of July.

For years, Jensen Huang was a frequent presence at Silicon Valley start-up events, networking with founders, judging pitch competitions and showing up at “demo” days.

The Nvidia chief executive became a godlike figure in the start-up ecosystem, not just because the industry idolized him as one of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs. Mr. Huang, 63, also made it his mission to help start-ups gain a foothold against the industry’s biggest and most powerful tech companies, providing funding and computing power.

“As many good ideas as we have, you don’t have all the world’s good ideas,” he said on the Acquired podcast in 2023.

So Mr. Huang’s abrupt resignation from Nvidia on Thursday has investors and start-up founders nervous that they have lost a powerful ally.

“Nvidia is the central bank of A.I. and all of a sudden, the Fed chairman is out,” said Tomasz Tunguz, an investor at Theory Ventures, which funds young start-ups.

Nvidia held $48 billion worth of stakes in 229 private companies, including large stakes in OpenAI and Anthropic, at the end of July, according to securities filings. It more than doubled its start-up investments in six months.

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