Comment by aurareturn
18 days ago
Why is it a big deal?
Nvidia invested $2b into CoreWeave for 9% equity stake. CoreWeave is spending $35b in CapEx in 2026. Therefore, Nvidia's investment is only 5.7% of CoreWeave's single year CapEx. The other $32b is coming from other sources that isn't Nvidia. This is hardly circular.
Nvidia invests in Neoclouds because it's a hedge against hyperscalers having too much power, ie designing and prioritizing their own chips, and not fully using Nvidia's rack design. Neoclouds give hyperscalers competition. Neoclouds accept Nvidia investments because it allows them to secure Nvidia chips first, which is a competitive advantage since new Nvidia chips have been as much as ~5-20x more efficient than old Nvidia chips.
Nvidia was planning to directly compete against hyperscalers through DGX Cloud. They cancelled public DGX Cloud access when they found that investing in Neoclouds would accomplish the same goals without having to compete against their biggest customers.
If you're Nvidia, it's smart because Neoclouds that you have a large stake in will deploy your full stack from GPUs to networking to storage racks. They will share valuable usage data back to you so you can design a better next generation. Hyperscalers are likely a lot less cooperative, prefer to use their own designs if possible, and will guard their usage data.
My understanding is that it's not about the money itself but the model:
- you fund a new company and sign long terms contracts with it - this new company uses the money you gave it and a lot of debt (backed by long term contracts) to build datacenters and buy a lot of GPU - your figures look great
What happens when they run out of debt or funds? If they reach some kind of profitability it's not a big deal, but if not ...
EDIT
Forget to mention the buyback of unused capacity problem: what happens to your figures when you have to buy back tons of unused GPUs?
Yes, circular financing is not by itself a problem.
It being that size, lasting for that long, and the total lack of viable products created by it are the problem. Financing only adds leverage, that makes every loss or profit larger.
Coreweave and Nebius think this is a great business model. Their lenders also think this can work. It's not the fault of Nvidia.
If their business model thinks they can make a profit doing it this way, why stop them?
The core problem here seems to be that people think your supplier having an equity stake in your company is wrong or risky.
> Coreweave and Nebius think this is a great business model.
It's irrelevant.
> If their business model thinks they can make a profit doing it this way, why stop them?
I don't think someone needs to stop them, but there are some legit questions that need an answer:
- what happens to all these companies when growth decelerate or stop?
- what happens to nvidia stock when it has to buy back unused gpus?
- what are the risk that a sectorial financial crisis turn into a major economic crisis?
> The core problem here seems to be that people think your supplier having an equity stake in your company is wrong or risky.
If these were all private entities, I think it'd be okay.
But they're public entities and they're using the pittance of investment as a force multiplier on their stock price, which they're then regularly using to raise capital.
A lot of dumb money in retail investors (as well as corporate) are a big reason this valuations bubble is occuring - which is really the elephant in the room. It's not that the tech isn't real. It's that the valuations behind it have already priced in maybe a decade of profit that hasn't come close to materializing for the LLM vendors; although, the shovel sellers and makers are doing phenomenal - and they have a vested interest to keep the party going with many sweetheart financing/equity deals.
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This is not remotely new. When I worked at Intel ~20 years ago, Intel Capital invested in startups that would buy Intel hardware. Some of them succeeded, some did not.
But "invest in companies that may grow your own TAM" is an ancient strategy. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't (like any strategy).
I'm not disagreeing with you, just saying it's business as usual.
I don't think its really the novelty of the situation that has people worried, its the scale of it and how that scale impacts the speed at which billions of dollars of market value could poof away when/if the music stops.
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For anyone else wondering, TAM seems to be ‘total addressable market’ if my searching is accurate.
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> If they reach some kind of profitability it's not a big deal, but if not ...
What is the end of this sentence?
There are two types of people. Those who can extrapolate from incomplete data, and
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... then it is a big deal.
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It's not circular!
And if it is, it's not a problem!
And if it's a problem, it doesn't affect me!
Those are 3 thresholds that a situation typically has to meet before people get upset about something. Arguably the 3rd one is not great, but the other two are just obvious and basic requirements. In this case even that last one is fine, the financial system is set up so that, in theory, other people losing money doing something stupid is a problem firewalled to just them.
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If you think it's a problem, short NV or buy competitors who are not doing this or don't buy their share at all. If you're right, they'll get burned soon enough and it's none of your business!
To make money on financial markets it's not just about "if" but also "when" ... and even if I think it's problem (which I didn't say) i for sure don't know "when"!
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Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
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If it goes bust who bails them industry out?
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Heavy bags huh?
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Bear in mind the last big thing from the tech industry was cryptocurrency.
And that was rife with scams, chicanery, and nonexistent investments. As well as needing lots of GPU-filled power hungry data centres.
So I think a lot of people are viewing the AI boom through the same lens.
I don't think the tech industry embraced cryptocurrency.
There are a few outliers like Meta's basket of currency crypto attempt and Sam Altman's World Coin.
Meanwhile, the entire tech industry has embraced LLMs one way or another.
Maybe not, but the cryptocurrency grifters all dressed themselves as tech visionaries.
And tech venture capitalists, Altman and Musk were big boosters of cryptocurrencies.
To an outsider, cryptocurrency cones from the tech industry, despite the fact Apple and Google didn’t bet big on it.
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"the real deal"? this whole framing is black and white.
It can be useful and also be a complete and utter fucking scam the way it's "produced" and sold.
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It sounds like Nvidia is not only supplying GPUs first to neoclouds, it is also supplying them for free if they cannot be resold:
"Furthermore, in the case of CoreWeave, Nvidia has also provided a significant financial backstop against unsold GPU capacity. Under the agreement with an initial value of $6.3 billion, “in instances where [CoreWeave’s] datacenter capacity is not fully utilized by its own customers, NVIDIA is obligated to purchase the residual unsold capacity through April 13, 2032.” In other words, Nvidia is committed to purchasing unsold GPU capacity if CoreWeave is unable to find another buyer. With an initial value of $6.3 billion, there is the potential that the arrangement could become larger over time."
I don't know how Nvidia is handling Coreweave GPU sales revenue in their accounting, but it sounds to me like it should have a pretty big asterisk attached to it. It's more like a consignment arrangement than an actual sale. And it obviously creates a huge incentive for Coreweave to over-order GPUs, since there's no risk (I doubt they're paying cash up front).
From an accounting perspective, this absolutely isn't a consignment agreement.
The sale of the GPUs by Nvidia to CoreWeave is real. CoreWeave pays Nvidia cash and becomes the owner of the asset, so it's properly booked as a sale. If it can't sell capacity, the GPUs are not returned to Nvidia.
CoreWeave is using debt to make the purchases but the backstop provided by Nvidia ostensibly helps it get better loan terms. That doesn't change the accounting.
If Nvidia has to purchase unused capacity, it simply becomes an operating expense for Nvidia.
Nvidia's exposure is the $6.3 billion backstop obligation and the equity it holds in CoreWeave.
>CoreWeave is using debt to make the purchases but the backstop provided by Nvidia ostensibly helps it get better loan terms.
According to the article, the $6.3B is a floor, not a ceiling. And it's not clear whether CoreWeave is actually paying cash or getting the GPUs on credit. If the full amount is getting booked, it's an accounting loophole that's being exploited. If GM sells Hertz a million cars, but says "Hey, we'll buy these back if you can't rent them," can GM book all those cars as actual revenue? What if Hertz only has to pay 10% up front and the rest in 5 years?
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You're probably just responding to the headline but this person is an AI bull and isn't claiming it's a big deal, she's going into it and explaining it.
It's a bad headline because most of the article isn't about circular financing and it's only 5.7% of anyway.
People are looking for the AI bear case - so this headline gotta work better. Its not a bad idea haha. More people suspect there is some circular shenanigans but want confirmation -- so maybe this is the best way to lure them in. Come as the bear, stay for the bull.
With just these 2 comments, now I'm really gonna read that article.
Can someone even outline the AI bull case? I can’t fathom one at all.
https://isaiprofitable.com/
The only profitable company is the one running the scam.
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Just the look and feel and the subscribe fixed position in particular, made me bounce.
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> Why is it a big deal? Nvidia invested $2b into CoreWeave for 9% equity stake.
Depends if they actually got the $2b in real money. There's a difference.
It's a big deal if no money was involved. Nothing even entered the company directly. Some deals have structured with Special Purpose Vehicles where money goes to the SPV. The SPV buys GPUs with it (from Nvidia). GPUs is loaned back to the company involved. So this company is stuck with this GPU rental, which may or may not be what they want and not $2b.
This sounds like a bad deal? So Nvidia had to sweeten the deal and promise min utilization on those GPUs by renting it themselves even if they don't need it.
So what's income and what's expense here?
That's the problem. It's inflated and messed up.
NVIDIA's $2b into CoreWeave was a stock purchase.
https://investors.coreweave.com/news/news-details/2026/NVIDI...
Billions of dollars sounds like a literal "big deal", but not necessarily "a problem". Worst case for nVidia is they lose 2 billion dollars, NBD.
anyone can isolate one number to fit their bias. if you look at the wider financing in the industry and the context of multiple AI deals in the billions without any cold hard cash flow or reasoning it kinda makes sense
But we're seeing Anthropic add $15b ARR every month. They're adding 0.34 Salesforce every single month! In 3 months, they add one Salesforce business.
How are we still saying there is no outside money flowing in? Demand is so great that no one has any extra capacity.
And clearly, the more compute we have, the better the results. AI intelligence has not hit a ceiling yet. More compute means more training, more inference, more thinking, more verification, more multi-agent work.
Simple answers: because it makes for a good headline.
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