Life after Jensen: What Nvidia’s shakeup means for private AI

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Nvidia poured $189 billion into AI this year. With Huang out, startups and neoclouds are bracing for a slowdown.

This time last week, AI without Jensen Huang seemed impossible. Today, that’s the world we live in.

Granted, it’ll have been less than (or about) 24 hours into that new world by the time you’re reading this, and there’s so much we don’t know about what a Jensen-less AI landscape looks like. One thing we do know: It will affect the private markets.

“Nvidia matters more to private AI markets than any single investor because it has three roles,” said Harrison Rolfes, PitchBook senior research analyst, who was among many who answered my feverish reporting calls yesterday. “It’s the largest corporate investor in U.S. AI. It’s the main supplier for AI startups, and it’s the main [benchmark] public stock investors use to judge the AI market.”

Now, in the near term at least, how Nvidia and new interim CEO Colette Kress will handle dealmaking is in question. Rolfes pointed out to me that Nvidia invested $189 billion in 2026, making it AI’s top U.S. corporate backer. This broke down somewhat expectedly: OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI account for $172 billion, and 27 other deals make up the remaining $17 billion. Kress, and any Huang successor, could be more circumspect moving forward. (Indeed, worth noting: Nvidia’s blockbuster $12.93 billion buyout of open-source startup Hugging Face hasn’t yet closed.) And some companies will struggle more than others, especially neoclouds, for which Huang was dealmaker and guarantor.

“If they’re dependent on Nvidia to bankroll them, like [CoreWeave] or Lambda Labs or some of these neoclouds, then I think you could be really screwed,” one early-stage VC told me.

Much will move forward, nevertheless: My colleague Beatrice Nolan and I reported that Anthropic’s IPO is high-stakes but (for now) very much on, and some VCs told me that, yes, this could pressure AI valuations—and so what.

“I think the valuations were ridiculous anyway,” said Rob Biederman, managing partner at Asymmetric.

For startups wondering what’s next, Rolfes had some advice: Nvidia…

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