Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said the company will “probably” not invest $100 billion (£75bn) in OpenAI, following a much smaller $30bn investment as part of a funding round last week, giving the reason as the AI start-up’s likely IPO sometime this year.

“I think the opportunity to invest $100 billion in OpenAI is probably not in the cards,” Huang said.

Because of the expected IPO, “this might be the last time we’ll have the opportunity to invest in a consequential company like this”, Huang said.

He said Nvidia’s recent $10bn investment in Anthropic was also probably “the last” in that company due to Anthropic’s expected IPO.

The comments at a Morgan Stanley conference come after months of speculation around the relationship between Nvidia and OpenAI companies, the two most prominent leaders in the generative AI boom that has swept the world.

In September, Nvidia said it would invest up to $100bn into Nvidia over a period of several years, with the rounds of investment tied to the start-up’s successive deployments of Nvidia’s chips in data centres, but the companies provided few details.

The announcement spurred further similar announcements and drove up stock prices, but the agreement was never finalised, and in January had reportedly stalled.

Meanwhile, the economics of the AI boom have changed, with last year’s optimistic announcements giving way to the realities of building massive data centres for powering the technology.

Such facilities consume huge amounts of power, water and other natural resources, and potentially drive up prices for local residents, something that has been drawing an increasing backlash.