Nvidia AI financing Jensen Huang

por Huda Thomas: Jensen Huang

Nvidia's latest numbers are historic, $96.2B revenue and $59.7B net income, the most profitable quarter any public company has ever had. But here's the twist: Jensen Huang told Fox Business that the biggest AI labs can't get standard loans. Their demand is outrunning their balance sheets and credit profiles, and they lack the long-term contracts and investment-grade financing to build AI factories on their own. So Nvidia steps in and finances the purchase of its own chips. Every chip Nvidia can make next year is already sold, Huang said. There's a compute campus in Ohio with OpenAI as the tenant, tied to roughly $105 billion in commitments from Nvidia, and OpenAI's planned compute commitments total about 12 gigawatts. CFO Colette Kress confirmed Nvidia will also provide selective credit enhancement for nearly 2 gigawatts at a second frontier lab, though she wouldn't name it. Nvidia also put up to $10 billion into Anthropic at a valuation near $350 billion, and Anthropic agreed to buy up to a gigawatt of Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems. Nvidia isn't just guaranteeing these companies, it owns pieces of them. The filing shows $18 billion committed to equity investments for the rest of the fiscal year, and $47.9 billion already sitting in private companies as of late July. Last week, Huang sat on a CNBC set with six Wall Street firms, Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, KKR, who signed a memorandum to mobilize up to $500 billion for AI data centers. Nvidia kept the option to backstop up to a quarter of those deals. And Huang announced that Nvidia GPUs are now an asset class, so pension and credit funds can lend against graphics cards like they lend against office towers. Kress saw the circular financing accusations coming and addressed them head-on: 'We recognise the scale of this support, and we know some will call this circular financing. We see it differently.' But look at the two things Huang says about the same companies. On the earnings call, he said AI has hit its inflection point, tokens are productive and profitable, and compute is now revenue. But he also said those same labs can't secure investment-grade financing on their own. A business that's inflecting into profit is exactly the business a bank lends to, banks lend against cash flow every day. But Nvidia's guarantee exists because something in that first story isn't landing with the people whose job is pricing risk. Kress does have a real answer though: she said the second lab's credit support only complements capacity it already secured on its own, without Nvidia backing it. Vendor financing is also old and legal, Cisco did it, and GE built a finance arm on it. Huang's case is that Nvidia understands these businesses better than any lender could, and he says the risk is low and his only regret is not investing more and sooner. He may be completely right. But one thing is certain: Nvidia guarantees the paper, the paper buys the chips, Nvidia books the sale, then tells you the order book is full for a year. That order book is the entire argument for a $5 trillion company. And Jensen Huang just explained, in his own words, that his customers couldn't have written those orders without him. Isn't this suspicious?