Nvidia's $189 billion checkbook was the engine of America's AI boom, and with Jensen Huang gone, no one knows who is holding the pen.
Nvidia backed AI companies with $189 billion in 2026, more than any other U.S. corporation. Nearly all of it went to three names: OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI absorbed $172 billion, while the remaining $17 billion was split across 27 other deals.
Interim CEO Colette Kress inherits that book at a moment of unusual concentration. Nvidia is at once the largest corporate investor in U.S. AI, the main supplier of chips to the very startups it funds, and the public stock the market leans on to price the entire AI trade.
Dealmaking is set to tighten. The company's $12.93 billion purchase of open-source startup Hugging Face has yet to close, and any permanent successor to Huang is likely to be more guarded with capital.
The most exposed companies are the neoclouds. CoreWeave, Lambda Labs and their peers were built on Nvidia's willingness to act as both financier and guarantor, and losing that backstop leaves them badly positioned.
A reset in AI valuations may follow, and parts of the venture world would welcome one, on the view that valuations were already stretched and that a shakeout would clear out weak ideas now attracting funding. Anthropic's planned IPO remains on track for the time being.
For startups, the near-term playbook is simpler: skip the pitch to Nvidia and go buy compute instead. Investment will be slower for now, but GPU prices are likely to fall, and cheaper chips would let early-stage teams ship products and push more seed and Series A companies forward.