At the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said his company’s recent investments in OpenAI and Anthropic will likely be the last of the two, saying the investment opportunity will close once they go public, expected later this year.

It can be that simple. While firms sometimes practically pile into companies At their public debut Looking further up, Nvidia is making money by selling the chips that power both companies — not that it needs to erode its profits by pouring more money into either.

Nvidia, for its part, isn’t offering much on the matter. Asked for comment earlier today after Huang’s comments, a spokesperson pointed TechCrunch to a transcript of the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call, where Huang said all of Nvidia’s investments are “very focused on expanding and deepening the reach of our ecosystem,” a goal both of its predecessors have staked out.

Still, a few other dynamics may also explain the pullback, including the circular nature of the arrangements themselves. When Nvidia first announced it would invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI last September, MIT Sloan Professor Michael Cusumano described it to the Financial Times.Type of wash“, observing that “Nvidia is investing $100 billion in OpenAI stock, and OpenAI is saying they’re going to buy $100 billion or more of Nvidia chips.”

There is growing concern that such deals could happen. Creating an investment bubble This may explain why commitment has declined. Nvidia’s investment was finalized last week as part of OpenAI’s $110 billion round. 30 billion dollars – much less than this earlier covenant. (Huang has already dismissed another popular theory — that there’s bad blood between the two companies — as “nonsense.”)

Meanwhile, Nvidia’s relationship with Anthropic appears to have come full circle. Just two months after Nvidia announced a 10 billion dollars Investments In November, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei took the stage in Davos and, without naming Nvidia directly, compared the process of US chip companies selling high-performance AI processors to approved Chinese customers to “selling nuclear weapons to North Korea.” Ouch

In the past, nuclear weapons were the least of these comparisons. Just days ago, the Trump administration blacklisted Anthropic, barring federal agencies and military contractors from using its technology after the company refused to allow its models to be used for autonomous weapons or mass domestic surveillance.

Within hours of the announcement, OpenAI said it had reached its agreement with the Pentagon — a move Anthropic called “reckless” and the public sees the same. Within 24 hours of the back-to-back announcements, Anthropic’s Claude ChatGPT jumped to the top of the free app rankings on Apple’s US App Store. (At the end of January, Claude was out of the Top 100. Sensor tower data.)

Where it comes down to is Nvidia is at stake in two companies that, at this particular moment, are pulling in very different directions, and potentially dragging customers and partners along for the ride.

Whether Huang saw any of this coming, given Nvidia’s partnership, is impossible to know. But the reason he cited Wednesday for potentially pulling the plug on future investments — that the IPO window closes the door on this type of deal — is hard to square with how private equity ultimately works. What’s looking more likely is that it’s getting out of a situation that’s gotten really complicated, really fast.