Nvidia's Jensen Huang Battles for AI Gateway: 44% of Nvidia's Revenue Comes from Three Customers

Beating AI News Flash: Nvidia has been aggressively investing in AI companies recently, with numerous undisclosed acquisition negotiations behind the scenes. The Information revealed that Jensen Huang once attempted to join the battle for OpenRouter. At the time, Stripe and Databricks were already in acquisition talks. Nvidia expressed willingness to make a generous offer but needed more time for evaluation. OpenRouter's founder didn't wait and ultimately chose Stripe. Nvidia didn't even get the chance to formally make a bid.

A similar battle played out with Hugging Face. OpenAI had considered investing $100 million, and companies like Salesforce also had acquisition intentions. Hugging Face's co-founder then proactively reached out to Jensen Huang. Nvidia quickly finalized an acquisition deal worth approximately $12.9 billion, equivalent to more than 80 times the company's annualized revenue.

Both platforms serve as important gateways for AI developers. Hugging Face allows developers to publish, download, and use open models, while OpenRouter lets users access hundreds of models through a single interface. They don't need to build the most powerful AI models themselves, yet they connect a vast number of model developers and users.

Huang's aggressiveness is tied to Nvidia's growing dependence on a handful of customers. Financial reports show that in the six months ending in July this year, three direct customers contributed 44% of Nvidia's revenue. If the future AI market is dominated by a few giants, Nvidia's chip business will become increasingly constrained by them. Huang wants to see thousands of diverse models coexist, so that more companies continue to purchase and use AI computing power.

Nvidia is also looking for new buyers beyond data centers. Perplexity's CEO once proactively proposed that Nvidia acquire the company, and the two sides even discussed a technology licensing and talent acquisition deal worth at least $20 billion. Ultimately, the two sides chose to collaborate, bringing Perplexity's AI Agent to run locally on DGX Spark. Nvidia also plans to invest approximately $3 billion in Perplexity.