Jensen Huang’s sudden resignation has thrown Nvidia’s future into uncertainty, and the first fallout may be financial. Venture capitalists and founders now expect the chipmaker to pull back on a dealmaking spree that topped $140 billion in just two months. That raises questions for the AI companies that depend on its money and its chips.
Under Huang, Nvidia became more than a chip supplier; it became the AI industry’s financier. Its balance sheet funded customers, guaranteed their computing capacity and locked in its own supply.
The deals were enormous. Nvidia reportedly backed a $105 billion credit guarantee for OpenAI’s data-centre leases, agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, and pursued multibillion-dollar stakes in Perplexity, Figure and Thinking Machines Lab. In February, it agreed to invest $30 billion in OpenAI.
That strategy rested on Huang’s personal relationships and his appetite for risk. With interim CEO Colette Kress, the company’s long-time CFO, now in charge, investors expect a more cautious approach.
The numbers support that view. Nvidia’s commitments far exceed the roughly $99 billion it holds in cash and securities. Critics have long warned that investing in customers who then buy its chips creates circular, fragile dependencies.
For AI start-ups and cloud providers, a slowdown could make funding harder to raise and chips harder to secure, just as enthusiasm for AI valuations is cooling.
Analysts are divided on the wider impact. StoneX’s Cody Acree says Nvidia’s production is “designed, planned, booked, and scheduled” well into 2028. William Blair’s Sebastien Naji warns that losing Huang’s dealmaking could let rivals such as AMD and Broadcom win “a bigger share of the market.”
Financial experts quoted by DigiTimes see limited systemic risk from the commitments already made. The bigger question is what comes next.
Nvidia’s quarterly results on 17 November, its first under new leadership, will give the earliest clues on whether the AI industry’s biggest backer is closing its chequebook.
