InfrastructureMay 21By Ben Smith

The Startups Building on Nvidia Compute

A part of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's latest message to investors is that Nvidia isn't just selling chips to Big Tech anymore: it's supplying the picks and shovels for an AI gold rush, where startups are building everything from AI agents to humanoid robots and robotaxis on Nvidia compute. One of the key backers of that ecosystem is Sarah Guo, founder of AI-native venture firm Conviction. She joins Ed Ludlow on "Bloomberg Tech." (Source: Bloomberg)

Why it matters

Huang's pivot in the investor narrative matters for operators because it reframes Nvidia's revenue concentration risk: the hyperscaler customer list is being supplemented by a long tail of physical AI startups (humanoid OEMs, robotaxi stacks, agent companies) that all depend on the same CUDA-plus-Isaac-plus-DRIVE stack. For anyone building a robot or vehicle company, that means the compute supplier is also funding, tooling, and effectively distributing your competitors.

The quiet part is the lock-in. Once a humanoid startup builds on Isaac Sim and Jetson Thor, switching to alternative silicon means rewriting the simulation, perception, and control pipelines. Conviction and other AI-native funds backing this ecosystem are underwriting that dependency. Operators evaluating roadmaps should price in the cost of being one of many tenants on Nvidia's platform versus the cost of staying portable.

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