Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said he wishes he’d invested more in Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, xAI, calling it one of the few opportunities he regrets not going bigger on.
Huang’s comments came during a CNBC interview in which he was asked about reports that Nvidia was helping finance xAI’s latest fundraising, and whether such deals amounted to “circular financing” — with Nvidia lending money to AI startups that, in turn, buy its chips.
“I’m super excited about the financing opportunity they’re doing,” Huang said in the Wednesday interview. “The only regret I have about xAI — we’re an investor already — is that I didn’t give him more money.”
Huang praised Musk’s track record, saying the Tesla and SpaceX founder has a knack for building transformative companies. “Almost everything Elon’s part of, you really want to be part of as well,” he said.
Huang described xAI as part of a new generation of AI firms, alongside OpenAI and Anthropic, that are reshaping computing as models become more capable and commercially viable.
“For the last several years, they were generating tokens at a loss,” he said. “But in the last several months, it’s become clear the technology is now reasoning, doing research, using tools — it’s actually useful. The tokens are profitable now.”
The Nvidia CEO said that the current wave of AI investment is “dramatically different” from the dot-com era, and is fueled by real, trillion-dollar demand.
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“Back then, all the internet companies combined were maybe $30 or $40 billion in size,” Huang said. “If you look at the hyperscalers now, that’s about $2.5 trillion of business already operating today.”
He added that the shift from CPU-based computing to GPU-powered generative AI is just beginning — a “multi-trillion-dollar buildout” that Nvidia is racing to support.
“My favorite enterprise AI service is Cursor,” Huang said. “Every one of our engineers, 100%, is now assisted by AI coders, and our productivity has gone up incredibly.”
