By Alexa LoMonaco
Publication Date: 2026-08-27 00:53:00
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Wednesday defended the chipmaker’s growing role in financing the artificial intelligence boom, pushing back on criticism that the company’s financial support for other AI companies is meant to inflate its top-line growth.
“I think they’re missing a very big point,” Huang said on CNBC’s “Mad Money,” shortly after the company released better-than-expected quarterly results.
“This is the first generation of startups that needed tens of billions of dollars to get funded,” Huang continued. “When was the last time anybody heard of a startup that needed billions of dollars to get off the ground and needed tens of billions of dollars to become profitable? That just never happened. But that’s really the nature of AI. The cost of building AI, the cost of deploying AI, it’s very capital intensive.”
Nvidia has become flush with cash from the AI boom, thanks to its status as the leading maker of the chips needed to power the large language models behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other similar applications. The company has used its windfall to invest in a number of companies across the AI ecosystem, ranging from model makers like OpenAI and Anthropic, to neocloud providers that rent Nvidia-powered computing capacity to customers.
However, Nvidia has increasingly used its balance-sheet strength to provide financial backstops for data center projects, including $105 billion for a massive compute campus under construction in Ohio where OpenAI will be the tenant….
