Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) appears ready to step back from making major equity investments in artificial intelligence startups.

Speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom conference in San Francisco on March 4, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang suggested the chipmaker may have written its final big checks to leading AI developers such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

The company recently reduced its investment commitment to OpenAI from a previously announced $100 billion deal to roughly $30 billion. Huang also indicated that Nvidia’s $10 billion investment in Anthropic, made in November, may mark the end of its direct backing of AI startups.

“This might be the last time we’ll have the opportunity to invest in a consequential company like this,” Huang said during the event.

While the official explanation centers on the companies potentially going public later this year, the broader picture suggests Nvidia may be repositioning itself to avoid conflicts as AI competition escalates.

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Nvidia now finds itself in a delicate position.

The company supplies GPUs, the critical hardware powering modern AI, to nearly every major player in the industry. This included OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and Google.

Holding equity stakes in multiple companies that are competing directly with each other, and in some cases clashing politically, has created an increasingly complicated dynamic.

Tensions recently escalated after the U.S. government ordered federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s technology following the company’s refusal to allow its Claude AI system to be deployed for autonomous weapons or mass domestic surveillance.

Shortly afterward, OpenAI announced a new Pentagon deal, a move that Anthropic publicly criticized. The clash quickly spilled into the public domain, with Anthropic’s Claude briefly overtaking ChatGPT in the U.S. Apple App Store rankings amid a surge in new users.

Against this backdrop, Nvidia appears to be stepping back from equity investments and returning to its core role as the industry’s hardware supplier.

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Even as Nvidia distances itself from startup equity stakes, demand for its hardware continues to surge across industries.

High-performance GPUs have become the backbone of modern computing infrastructure, powering everything from AI model training to large-scale data centers.

That demand has also begun spilling into the crypto mining sector.

While Nvidia chips are not used directly for Bitcoin mining, which relies on specialized ASIC machines, many Bitcoin mining companies are now pivoting toward AI infrastructure.

The shift is largely driven by the similarities between the two industries, which include massive data centers, large energy requirements and specialized computing hardware.

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Several companies that began as Bitcoin miners are now evolving into large-scale AI infrastructure providers, increasingly relying on Nvidia GPUs.

IREN (NASDAQ: IREN) recently announced plans to purchase more than 50,000 Nvidia B300 GPUs, expanding its AI computing capacity by roughly 50%. The deal would increase the company’s total GPU fleet to about 150,000 units by 2026.

Cipher Mining (NASDAQ: CIFR) has also begun transforming its data centers to host high-density AI workloads using Nvidia H100 and Blackwell GPUs as part of a long-term hosting agreement with AI infrastructure firm Fluidstack.

Meanwhile, CoreWeave (NASDAQ: CRWV), a company that originally started as a Bitcoin mining operation, has pivoted entirely into GPU cloud computing.

Earlier this year, Nvidia doubled down on that relationship with an additional $2 billion investment on top of a prior $6.3 billion agreement to purchase CoreWeave’s unused computing capacity through 2032.

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This story was originally published by TheStreet on Mar 6, 2026, where it first appeared in the Technology News section. Add TheStreet as a Preferred Source by clicking here.