How Jensen Huang's dramatic ouster from Nvidia affects Anthropic's $1.4 trillion IPO

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, center, stands behind Jensen Huang, right. Kent NISHIMURA / AFP via Getty Images Days away from Anthropic's gigantic initial public offering, the tech industry got its biggest shock in years.Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigned on Thursday after news of two alleged extramarital affairs and after he was placed under investigation by the company he'd led for 33 years. His sudden downfall will cause ripple effects across the AI industry. Huang turned Nvidia into one of the world's most influential companies by creating the computing chips that power top AI models.Huang's ouster has also become the latest twist in Anthropic's topsy-turvy IPO process, which has the AI company targeting a $1.4 trillion valuation as soon as next week.The news is a jolt of unwelcome uncertainty: Anthropic had said it would take $10 billion in investment from Nvidia. Nvidia's stock drop Thursday adds to a run of market jitters, and for the wider AI industry, losing Huang means losing a top financier and pitchman.Still, CEO Dario Amodei's company stands to benefit in several ways. He's battled with Huang for influence in Washington, particularly over chip exports to China. Huang has used his perch at Nvidia to support open-source models that compete with Anthropic's. Plus, Anthropic's diversified chip strategy looks wise.Neither Anthropic nor Nvidia responded to requests for comment from Business Insider.Here are the short- and long-term implications of Huang's ouster for Anthropic.Nvidia is helping buttress Anthropic's IPOMandeep Singh, an analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence covering Anthropic, said in a note published before Huang's ouster that Nvidia's $10 billion share of a planned IPO-day investment "could face heightened scrutiny" if Huang were removed. Colette Kress, Nvidia's chief financial officer, now leads in the interim."A leadership transition could prompt Nvidia's board to reassess the size, timing or strategic rationale of the commitment to Anthropic," Singh wrote. "Any delay or reduction could weaken an important signal of support for Anthropic's IPO pricing at around $1.4 trillion, though commitments from Google and other strategic investors might limit the financing impact." Harrison Rolfes, an analyst for PitchBook, expects the deal to go through as planned."It has nothing to do with Jensen's overall control," he told Business Insider. "It's just: 'We made the investment, and we're good to go.'"The bigger question mark, in Rolfes' mind, concerns Anthropic's rush to secure access to as many computing chips as possible as it scales. That relies in part on deals with Nvidia-backed "neoclouds," or AI data center developers. The IPO prospectus listed a $45 billion agreement with Nscale and a $41 billion agreement with Lambda — both are for Nvidia chips, and both companies rely on Nvidia's support for financing. Rolfes expects current deals to stay, and later ones to come in more slowly."Instead of, let's say, Dario or Elon Musk just calling Jensen to say, 'Hey, I need this by whenever,' it's now going to have to go through the bureaucracy of Nvidia," Rolfes said.Kunjan Sobhani, a Bloomberg Intelligence analyst who covers Nvidia, likewise said he expects the company's commitments to remain in place, though future rounds might slow down since Huang was so instrumental in dealmaking.Jensen Huang and Dario Amodei battled on policiesAmodei and Huang's fortunes and successes were often tied at the hip. Nvidia's chip breakthroughs have enabled Anthropic to deliver more AI tokens and boost its revenues. At the same time, the two had a stark and long-lasting disagreement over US chip export policy.In 2025, Amodei wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed calling export controls a "valuable tool in slowing China's AI development," adding that President Donald Trump's actions would "help determine whether democracies or autocracies lead the next technological era."Huang, meanwhile, lobbied in the other direction and secured the Trump administration's approval for the sale of his H200 chips in China, with individual Commerce Department approvals.At the Davos conference last February, Amodei likened the US administration's choice to allow certain Nvidia chips to be sold to China to "selling nuclear weapons to North Korea." Huang rejected the comparison as "lunacy" in a podcast shortly after.While Huang cozied up to Trump during his second term, his exit from Nvidia could weaken his influence. And the House Committee on Foreign Affairs is probing his relationship with Chinese executive Alice Huang, whose Singapore-based firm bought many Nvidia chips. Politico reported Thursday that the former Nvidia CEO has agreed to testify.Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are now coming out in support of stronger chip export restrictions — a win for Amodei.Huang also supported open models, which compete with Anthropic's and OpenAI's closed models. The promotion of open models aligns with Nvidia's business strategy, Sobhani said, so he doesn't expect the company to withdraw its support, though "the investment in that area could slow down."More chips in Anthropic's stackOne pillar of Anthropic's IPO pitch looks particularly strong amid Nvidia's turmoil: it doesn't rely too heavily on Nvidia's hardware.In addition to Nvidia's chips, Anthropic uses chips from Amazon Web Services, Google, Broadcom, and AMD. AMD and Broadcom both compete with Nvidia, and each saw its stock jump on Thursday's news.More of Nvidia's top-end chips wouldn't hurt, though. If the government does impose tighter export restrictions, it would likely mean more of its chips end up in American data centers, expanding the pool of compute that Anthropic buys as it scales.Sobhani said he doesn't expect Huang's exit to affect Nvidia chips' performance, competitiveness, or the overall supply the company can make available, at least in the short- to medium-term.That said, Nvidia's first earnings report without Huang at the helm takes place Tuesday, with Anthropic's IPO expected in the days after that."We'll get more color next week about what really we should expect," Sobhani said.Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at scouncil@businessinsider.com, or over text, Signal, Telegram, or WhatsApp at 415-757-8198. Use a personal email address, a non-work WiFi network, and a non-work device; here's our guide to sharing information securely. Read next Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know Stephen is a senior tech reporter at Business Insider, covering OpenAI, Anthropic and the ecosystem around the leading artificial intelligence companies.Previously he covered technology at SFGATE, and has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Information and CNBC. He studied journalism and economics at Northwestern University.His work has earned an SF Press Club Investigative Reporting Award and, in 2025, SPJ NorCal’s Excellence in Journalism Award for Technology Reporting.Stephen lives in San Francisco. Contact him via email at scouncil@businessinsider.com, or on Signal, Telegram, or WhatsApp at 415-757-8198. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely. AI Tech OpenAI More Artificial Intelligence Leadership Big Tech Technology Investing Stocks Stock Market Wall Street Tech stocks