On November 13, TechCrunch quoted several investors and founders saying that after Jensen Huang stepped down as Nvidia CEO, the AI startup world lost more than a leader — it lost the most generous checkbook of the past few years. One neocloud founder described the moment he heard the news as like a bomb going off.
Just how much has Nvidia invested in recent years?
PitchBook data shows that Nvidia took part in 105 funding rounds this year alone, pouring tens of billions of dollars into startups annually in recent years — often as the largest investor in the deal. It backed CoreWeave while it was still private, joined two of Crusoe's rounds including a $1.4 billion Series E, and this year agreed to buy Hugging Face for $13 billion, with the deal expected to close in 2027. Last year it wrote an $800 million check into a $2 billion round for Reflection AI. Mistral AI, Lambda and Black Forest Labs are also on its investment list.
Several people interviewed said many of those investment decisions came from Huang himself. Colette Kress, the CFO now serving as interim CEO, is seen as more conservative, and one investor put it bluntly: she is unlikely to commit the same amount of money to keep the early-stage ecosystem going. Nvidia's presence was worth more than cash: an infrastructure company needing $100 million to $500 million for GPUs could often raise half of that from Nvidia at a valuation of $1 billion or more — and other investors felt safe following in.
Who fills the gap is still unclear
The gap is most likely to hit neoclouds, inference providers and open-weight model companies first — the businesses that burn the most cash and depend most on Nvidia's backing. Founders in Europe are especially worried: Huang was long willing to invest outside the United States, and that support will be hard to replace quickly. Google, Amazon, Microsoft and AMD are the names mentioned as possible replacements, but a Battery Ventures partner argued they are more likely to back mature companies and promote their own chips and clouds than to write hundreds of millions of dollars in checks to pre-revenue infrastructure startups the way Nvidia did.
Even so, everyone interviewed agreed that an investment slowdown alone will not end the AI boom. Nvidia's dominance came with its own cost: its large checks locked startups into its chips and, in effect, held back competition. If it tightens its spending, rivals and smaller competitors may find more room instead. For founders, the practical changes are more concrete: valuations on the next round are likely to be lower, diligence stricter — and who Huang's successor will be, and whether the old pace of investing returns, remains unknown.
