Key facts
- Huang co-founded Nvidia and led it for 33 years before stepping down, TechCrunch reported.
- Nvidia participated in 105 startup funding rounds in 2026, often as the largest investor, per PitchBook.
- Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face for $13 billion in 2026, with closing expected in 2027.
- Nvidia put $800 million into Reflection AI's $2 billion Series B, the Wall Street Journal reported.
- Interim CEO Colette Kress is expected to make changes to Nvidia's startup investment approach, per investors.
- Nvidia backed CoreWeave while it was private and joined two Crusoe rounds, including a $1.4 billion Series E.
Jensen Huang stepped down as Nvidia's CEO, ending a 33-year tenure in which he co-founded and led the chipmaker, TechCrunch reported on November 13, 2026. One founder of a neocloud, a cloud provider renting out AI computing, told the outlet the news felt like a bomb going off.
Nvidia has been one of the largest investors in AI startups, joining 105 funding rounds in 2026, often as the biggest participant, according to PitchBook. Maria Davidson, founder of Relational Capital, told TechCrunch that a change in that direction would be a big blow to many young companies. Dawn Capital's Shamilla Bankiya said Nvidia is carrying almost every AI-native startup from application to neocloud.
Umesh Padval, managing partner at Seligman Ventures, said most significant startup investment decisions came from Huang himself. Padval has known Huang since serving on the board of Mellanox Technologies, a networking chipmaker Nvidia acquired for approximately $7 billion in 2020. Investors told TechCrunch they hope Huang's eventual successor resumes the dealmaking but do not expect it in the short term.
Interim CEO Colette Kress is expected to make changes to Nvidia's startup investments, particularly in the AI companies central to the data center build-out, according to the report. One investor described Kress as much more conservative and said they did not think she would commit the same amount of money to keep the early-stage ecosystem going.
Nvidia's largest bets went to neoclouds, inference providers and open weight models, which are expensive for smaller companies to build. It backed CoreWeave while the company was still private and joined two Crusoe rounds, including a $1.4 billion Series E. It agreed to buy Hugging Face for $13 billion in 2026, a deal expected to close in 2027, and holds investments in Mistral AI, Lambda and Black Forest Labs. Last year it wrote an $800 million check into a $2 billion Series B round for Reflection AI, according to the Wall Street Journal.
TechCrunch reported that Nvidia's backing at times locked startups into using its chips, reinforcing its market position. Dharmesh Thakker, a general partner at Battery Ventures, expects big tech rivals to compete for Nvidia's investment role, depending on who offers the best product, ecosystem and financial power to compete with CUDA, Nvidia's software platform for running AI models on its GPUs. He doubts they will put hundreds of millions into pre-revenue infrastructure startups the way Nvidia did.
One venture capitalist told TechCrunch that infrastructure companies needing $100 million to $500 million in GPUs would often raise half that from Nvidia at valuations of $1 billion or more. Nvidia is now expected to be more selective and to write smaller checks into existing portfolio companies, contributing to a drop in valuations, the report said. Amulya Vishwanath, who runs her own venture fund after working at Nvidia, told the outlet that founders and leaders must be held accountable and that the ecosystem is bigger than one person.