Huang Clashed With Anthropic's Brown Over Chip Cost Economics in Early 2022 Standoff

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang nearly skipped an early dinner with Anthropic founder Dario Amodei in May 2022 after the startup's chief compute officer presented spreadsheet data suggesting Google's Tensor Processing Units offered better value than NVIDIA's chips on a dollar-per-unit basis, according to Kevin Roose's new book "The AGI Chronicles." Huang reportedly objected to the analysis, allegedly calling Tom Brown, Anthropic's co-founder and Chief Compute Officer, a "bean counter" for prioritizing cost efficiency over NVIDIA's technical capabilities.