Initial Meeting Tensions
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had a rocky first meeting, according to an upcoming book. Kevin Roose, the author of the forthcoming book, The AGI Chronicles, published an excerpt on X that their initial rendezvous was filled with disagreements and included some slights. The meeting, which the book says took place in May 2022 at a restaurant in San Francisco, was to discuss Anthropic's compute needs.
Apropos of Jensen/Ezra, here's a story from The AGI Chronicles about the first time Dario Amodei and Jensen met to discuss Anthropic's compute needs. Didn't go well! pic.twitter.com/KQxsHarE9ySeptember 24, 2026
Hardware Disagreements
Roose writes that ahead of the dinner, Anthropic's chief compute officer, Tom Brown, had attempted to haggle for a discount on GPUs, showing Huang a spreadsheet suggesting that Tensor Processing Units from Google were a better investment than Nvidia's chips.
Partnership Evolution
The book claims that Huang, angry at the comparison, called Brown a bean counter, though an Nvidia spokesperson denied that to Roose. The dinner afterward did not go much better as Amodei repeatedly pressed Huang on plans for building a massive data center. While no immediate deal was struck at the dinner, the companies eventually formed a partnership. Today, Anthropic uses a mix of GPUs from Nvidia and AMD, Google's TPUs, and is working on custom inference chips.
Huang has publicly disagreed with calls for pacing and regulation, advocating instead for industry self-policing while stating that companies releasing unsafe products should face shutdowns.
