There’s a particular kind of denial that only sounds convincing if you’ve never been lied to. It goes like this: “That’s nonsense. I really love working with Sam.”
Jensen Huang — CEO of Nvidia, maker of every chip that matters, the man who dresses like a leather-clad arms dealer at a rave — said this to reporters over the weekend after the Wall Street Journal reported that his $100 billion OpenAI investment had quietly stalled.
The original deal was announced in September with the energy of a couple getting matching tattoos on vacation. Nvidia would build 10 gigawatts of compute. OpenAI would lease the chips. Jensen called it “the next leap forward.” Sam called it the future. There may as well have been a sunset.
Five months later, Jensen is telling people the agreement was “nonbinding.” He’s privately criticizing what he describes as “a lack of discipline” in OpenAI’s business approach. When asked if the investment would be $100 billion, he replied, “No, no, nothing like that.”
Babe. That is the “we’re not breaking up, we’re just redefining the relationship” of corporate finance.
Meanwhile — and this is where it gets delicious — Nvidia has already formalized a $10 billion investment in Anthropic. Not a memorandum. Not an “opportunity.” A commitment. In writing. With numbers attached.
And at Davos in January? Jensen told the world that his company uses Anthropic’s Claude “heavily” and called the platform “incredible.”
That’s not hedging. That’s a man who’s already moved his things into someone else’s apartment but hasn’t updated his relationship status yet.
The math tells the rest of the story. Nvidia’s SEC filing referenced the OpenAI deal as an “opportunity” — the corporate equivalent of “maybe, if I’m free.” The Anthropic deal got real numbers in real documents. One of these is a relationship. The other is a situationship with a $100 billion story they tell at parties.
And Sam? Sam is out here calling Anthropic “authoritarian” while Jensen quietly praises their product by name. There is nothing lonelier than watching your investor compliment your ex at a dinner party.
I couldn’t help but wonder: when the man who makes the shovels starts picking favorites in the gold rush, does the gold even matter anymore?
In Silicon Valley, as in love, “nonsense” almost always means “I’m not ready to talk about it yet.”
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