Would you buy branded clothing from your favourite tech firm?

Natalie Fratto wears her Nvidia jumper the way a sports fan wears a jersey. It is dark green, made of wool, costs $178, and has a cartoonish Jensen Huang on the front. Fratto doesn’t work for Nvidia. She runs a tech start-up in New York, and says the sweater stands for a team and an ethos she wants to root for.

That reaction is exactly what these companies seem to be selling. Nvidia’s clothes are not sitting in every shop window; they usually show up in pop-up stalls at conferences or in short online drops that vanish fast. The range includes T-shirts, hoodies and hats, but scarcity is part of the point. OpenAI mostly keeps its branded fashion for employees, only occasionally opening sales to the public for a few days. Anthropic went even further last year, turning a Manhattan pop-up coffee shop into a one-week giveaway for baseball hats embroidered with “thinking”.

Fashion professor Hazel Clark says the tactic is borrowed straight from luxury and streetwear: limit the supply, and desire goes up. That fits the way tech firms are using merch as a branding tool, not a side hustle. Nvidia, OpenAI and Anthropic declined to comment, but the logic is plain enough. These are rich companies. They do not need jumper money.

Palantir has taken the idea furthest. After years of criticism over work with the military and police, it launched clothing last year and now calls itself a “lifestyle brand”. Its head of strategic engagement, Eliano Younes, says buyers in more than 60 countries have picked up items that include a cotton jacket, and that the store’s success proves people want to affiliate with what the company stands for. Even one unnamed US buyer said the attraction was the controversy and all the chatter around it. Anduril is more blunt still, selling a hoodie that says “Rebuild the Arsenal” to back more US defence spending and manufacturing.

Back at Nvidia, the draw may be Huang himself. He has fans chasing autographs and selfies, and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg has joked that Huang is “Taylor Swift, but for tech”. That kind of celebrity explains a lot. Tech merch is not really about fabric. It is about wearing your allegiances on purpose, which is either marketing genius or a very expensive way to cosplay for adults.