who is going to pay back the money nVidia invests in AI labs, AI datacenter companies if the models are being served dirt cheap.
the Chinese are not the only competitor - Amazon with their Trainium, Google with their TPUs etc.
Nvidia might have a moat on training but on serving it's gonna be a blood bath.
But for now they're capturing 80% of all the AI spend so they gonna keep making money.
The fallacy I see repeatedly is someone spots a legitimate issue that could hurt Nvidia and by the time they have stood up the challenge to pull that off, Nvidia has pivoted and addressed it. Or more recently, they just acquired it like Groq.
For your premise to hold, you're asserting Nvidia is blind to inference. And yet his public positioning suggests otherwise.
https://qz.com/nvidia-gtc-2026-jensen-huang-keynote-takeaway...
What makes you think they've hit some sort of metaphorical iceberg and all they'll do before they sink is rearrange deck chairs?
And this is why the stock remains high. This hasn't even started to make a dent in Nvidia's bottom line yet.
These comparisons to Enron are absurd when Nvidia is generating this much cash flow.
Let's see the other alternatives come online and start taking away sales.
Not everything is an Enron
Kind of reminds me of the current lack of supply of GPUs and ram to consumers.
You could make an argument that maybe this is similar to oracle (I think?) in the com bubble financing networking gear to customers.
I still think that misses the mark since the customers using hardware are have demand for computer by their customers.
The WSJ recently reported that there’s around 3 trillion in off balance sheet liabilities floating around in AI. It’s very unclear where the $3 trillion to pay those bills will come from.
Nobody is saying it’s “illegal” but it was news in the WSJ as the companies using creative accounting aren’t exactly going out of their way to make sure everyone knows that this $3 trillion in liabilities exists.
Nvidia's financing is disclosed. Enron lied about its schemes.
I've also seen zero evidence that Nvidia is extending this credit to related parties to put in sham orders–that was part of Enron's shtick, too.
There is nothing illicit or illegal in anyway about what NVidia is doing. It's reasonable business practice, and people on HN are simply ignorant to think otherwise.
NVidia is very aware of the risks it entails, but has the money to cover those risks.
1. The equity investments Nvidia has made in its customers.
2. The guarantees/backstops it has extended to some of its customers.
3. Vendor financing.
The vendor financing is the least interesting of the bunch. Nvidia has already disclosed that when it provides vendor financing, the average customer pays in less than 60 days. These are not long-term financing arrangements and virtually every big company sells on these type of terms (net-30, net-60, etc.).
The equity investments and guarantees are where there is room for legitimate debate.
The guarantees dwarf the investments. If there is a shenanigan, it's going to be there.
The problem is the line between the guarantees and traditional vendor financing is blurry–one could argue use commitments are no different from repurchase commitments.
Which is exactly the point of the person you're responding to. What part of “but completely legal” isn't clear enough?
The OP clearly is implying that it should be illegal for some reason. This is wrong - not only is it nothing like Enron (!?) but it's a great way for both NVidia and the companies building on them to build what they want.
(Also note that illegal != illicit.)
I wish we still lived in an age where things were sold to cover their costs.
My money's on their product having 10% of its current user base if they charged 50 cents per month.
How much would the average normie pay if Google suddenly charged? Sure the user-base would drop.
And what? Did Google suddenly become a bad business?
I find it funny how people have these strange and hypocritical viewpoints when it comes to OpenAI and Anthropic when the hyperscalars like Google, Amazon etc, followed these exact same kinds of playbooks for years and years.
Google+ was the fastest-growing social network of all time not that long ago.
When you're one of a pair of VC darlings that have effectively-infinite money because of -in part- handwavy promises to cure cancer and eliminate 90% of payroll everywhere, or if you're an established company that has total control over very widely used consumer products, you can do all sorts of things to manufacture amazing growth numbers.
In the case of those VC darlings, we're seeing their shift towards providing their products that are most expensive to create exclusively to B2B customers and also the shift towards justifying the elimination of most of their R&D expenditure. Every company performs belt-tightening in advance of their IPO, [0] and those two are no exception.
[0] ...which is when their finances will be scrutinized by the public and regulators...
The world is fundamentally and momentously being rewired.
It can be manufacturing demand that wouldn't otherwise exist. It can be facilitating demand to come online sooner and smoother. You can't tell which it is by only looking at the transaction; you need to know how many dollars are going into the ecosystem as a whole for purchases of goods and services. Until Anthropic's S-1 lands tomorrow-ish, we won't have that publicly.
I'd argue that in this case, if the flywheel never reaches critical velocity, they are manufacturing demand.
Eh, I think it's an open question whether OpenAI and Anthropic would be buying GPUs like they are with or without Nvidia's financing. Financing customers' purchases isn't proof per se of demand creation versus demand inducement. Anyone who claims they've seen a certain fact in these financings is deluded or lying.
You need to be more specific, because there are absolutely sections of the AI economy that are clearly and presently profitable.
> Ai farms and much of Ai software world are money sucking machines
If AI farms refers to datacenters, plenty of existing ones are currently profitable.
Whose assets? Where are you getting this from to be able to state it with this level of certainty?
But here a reference; https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/datacenter-g...
Which is a fundamental difference. When Apple extends me credit to buy an iPhone, that isn't circular financing in a problematic way. I was buying the phone anyway, the financing just made it easier.
Generally, the fact that most non-Boomer people simply don't have the means to even save up for basic consumer goods like cars, furniture or a phone but have to go into debt instead is scary. Our entire economy has become a house of cards.
Oh hell yeah. But a lot of folks are treating the existence of customer financing as damning per se. The scale is daunting. But the scale of the entire AI enterprise is massive.
Yes --- and the scale of the money being set on fire is epic. And if/when the burning comes to a screeching halt, the resulting crash wil be likewise.
If you haven’t read “Smartest guys in the room” it’s important reading now as it’s scary similar to what’s going on now across AI. Nobody has alleged anything illegal but the net effect on building a house of cards in the AI bubble can be the same.
And that gap in where people are watching (AI company press releases or the creative accounting going on) explains why those watching this are saying “oh no, we’ve seen this movie before” when others are blinding all rah rah about the AI bubble going on forever.
Have you bothered to look at the finances of Nvidia's AI clients?
None of them are making any money. They're borrowing money they don't have in oder to buy from Nvidia. And now some of this money is coming from Nvidia itself.
In a round about way, Nvidia is buying it's own product.
It's pretty clear that this sort of thing can't continue indefinitely --- just like any Ponzi scheme.
Who are you thinking of? Because yes, I have, and they're not in line with the YouTube influencer consensus.
All the "frontier" AI vendors are borrowing money to invest in AI (and buy from Nvidia). None of these Nvidia customers are actually making money from it.
Anthropic and OpenAI are two cash burning machines that Nvidia has invested billions into --- so they can continue buying from Nvidia.
Bottom line: A lot (if not most) of Nvidia's cash flow is borrowed money --- and some of it is borrowed from Nvidia itself.
Some of it isn't even "cash flow". It's contract futures being counted as cash flow --- a la Enron accounting.
The amount of money Nvidia has put into the ecosystem is much, much less than money coming into the ecosystem from actual customers who are willing to pay for the products!
The idea that somehow Nvidia is financing the entire AI industry is laughable. The numbers do not add up at all if you look at the numbers of people paying for Google cloud GPU compute, AWS GPUs, Azure GPUs, Nebius, Coreweave, etc, not even including companies like Fireworks, BaseTen, Together AI, etc .
The reality is this, enterprise companies are spending HUGE amounts of their money on AI products because they are gaining value from them. This money (which doesn't originate from Nvidia) is flowing into the ecosystem. The money being spent by enterprises combined is far, far more than Nvidia puts in.
Yes, it is --- and this is not something I said. This is an absurd extrapolation done by you.
But there is no denying that Nvidia is investing billions in it's own customers (aka "lending") and others up and down the AI infrastructure stack.
And all of it has one objective --- to create what is being marked as "sales" for Nvidia.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/09/nvidia-embraces-ai-investor-...
If this isn't a house of cards, AI companies' customers. The companies and individauls ponying up for a Claude subscription or compute through OpenRouter.
Customer financing isn't inherently fucked. It's just highly suspect at the scale Nvidia's doing it. There was another thread where I noted that Nvidia's investments are literally monetarily significant, to the point that I expect them to start being directly referenced in the Fed's beige book [1].
As I understand it they are risking that even if the major AI labs fail all the compute capacity that's been built out will remain in demand at sufficiently high prices.
Companies who pay 99$ to make >99$ in return. I am not saying it works in all cases but that's the idea when a company spends money.
> Because it seems like so far everybody is losing money with no reversal of this trend in sight
I am not sure what you are seeing: Anthropic (as one of only two major companies that do just AI) is starting to return profits, while demand for AI is accelerating and, clearly, compute is maxed out. And I mean: On the entire planet. They are turning profits despite everything being in full buildout mode.
You, when their circular financing scheme fails and you're the one left holding the bag as your government says "they're too important to let them fail".
We're already seeing signs of this strategy from Open AI and Anthropic warning about the dangers of AI and the need for safety regulations. None of that stuff matters if China is not also on board with it.
You could say that about any historically inflated valuation all the way back to the tulip mania. Either the expected profit materializes or it doesn't.
> We're already seeing signs of this strategy from Open AI and Anthropic warning about the dangers of AI and the need for safety regulations
I would read this as a desire to pause training to be able to present a profit in anticipation of the IPO. The major AI labs mad scramble to IPO is if anything a sign that they aren't at all confident in the valuation. If they were they would be no hurry to cash out.
And I'd argue the timer started in 2023.
Trust me, there are many other people like me in the world and the enterprises are spending even more.
There is more money flowing into the overall AI ecosystem (by far) than the money Nvidia puts in.
The idea that Nvidia is artificially creating the whole demand is laughable and doesn't add up.
So for example if you invest $100 in a farm and get a return of 10%, where does that come from? The nutrients in the soil, the effort expended by the workers, and the power of the sun to turn seeds into food. All value comes either from finite resources in the ground (nuclear, oil, ...), from solar power, or from human effort (work, innovations, etc.)
So can you trace back Nvidia's incredible 10000% return on investment to any of these sources? Which ones?
Surprised basic stuff is now being questioned.
Value also comes from technology which you seem to suspiciously remove
No, it's very unlikely at this point every $1 Nvidia invests brings back $100. Stating something like that is almost a red flag that things are overheating.
But still, it seems that billionaires are lying left and right. It isn't just Elon.
So, in one aspect, like the Matrix, they're not lying: they litterally see that on the paper they're reading from.
But like in the matrix, they just need to be unplugged from the bullshit machine to recognize that this money doesn't exist in the real world.
Scientists, particularly the ones who get ragged on, you know, social scientists, are now well aware that no matter how well any given social goal works in the lab; no matter how much pscyhology they evaluate, depend on, etc, what matters is real world implementation.
Thier sheets of cash raining in from some future valuation simply do not exist in a vacuum, but they want to pretend it does.
So we're litterally watching capitalists look at their piece of meat inside the matrix, and telling us: they do not care that it doesn't actually exists, because on the Capitalism ledger, it feels like real meat.
seems no one is reading the article..
We are not at the top of this trend yet so I do not see this as over investment.
I remember the criticism Microsoft got for investing in Facebook/Meta that gave them a whooping $15B valuation and getting 1.7% in 2007. Not all deals will turn out that prescient but a few will and make up for any duds. This is a real market.
No, it's a high risk gamble.
If the market grows enough they will win the bet, but if the market doesn't or we get a recession that dries up capital they will be holding the bag.
So for this to become true there are some number of jobs that that pay $N salary are replaced completely by LLMs that do the job for $N-0.01?
Is that what you mean by "market grows enough"
Even in a recession I think the shift towards AI would just accelerate since it is usually cheaper than humans.
The real risk I feel if what if AI is too successful and there is a lack of human demand because of dropping wages/employment?
(Then I wonder if sentient robot demand will make up for it? Although I realize that veers into science fiction futures.)
And then the following trend will be humanoids and similar and they are barely getting started.
given the stakes, we'd better hope it starts showing up soon.
Its a mighty fine deal for Nvidia
What I came up with was Nvidia is maybe slightly overpriced currently, but a bad stock to buy or hold onto because the risk of it shrinking is significantly higher than the risk of it ever doubling again (and it trades at a tech/growth multiple). The case is far worse for Anthropic/OpenAI who, at current pricing, capture such a tiny slice of the pie it's hard to see how they will stay in business long term.
From the article:
> I put in one, and a hundred comes back.”
> The figure was rhetorical, not a disclosed 100-times investment return.
There's a lot more words in there, but it doesn't seem to say anything else.
But the wealth, or value if you will, remains unaffected.
Money isn't wealth. It's just a representation. It used to be wealth back in the days before paper money, when a coin actually had the value it said it had.
Nvidia is investing in their customers by buying their stock. Nvidia is directly buying compute from their customers. Nvidia is making "if you can't find a customer, we'll take all of your capacity" deals. Nvidia is making a ton of fake huge-number deals which are supposed to be realized over time but most likely never will.
They are doing everything they can to make that customer look like a healthy and valuable business which everyone should invest in and loan money to - which in turn flows directly back to Nvidia to buy GPUs and boost their revenue. They are essentially creating sockpuppets to keep external money flowing in so they can keep the money printer running.
But its quite obvious that while there are some similarities its simply not the same. Most analysis, so it seems, are quite surface.
Are there any deeper finical analysis on the investments of Nvidia and how they are financed?
When I zoom out to 5 years, it does not look like "keeps falling".
Yes, it seems very possible to me that Nvidia makes a lot of money. They are literally the largest company in the world.
Who pays? Only all the companies, desperately raising as much capital as possible, issuing new stock to do it, going for unprecedented investment rounds, burning cash reserves to fund the largest data centre rollout in history.
Who builds the things that go into said datacenters? The thing that has also raised in price dramatically in recent years?
From sub million to hundreds of millions I could theoretically see. Even tens of millions to billions. And even then I would be extremely skeptical.
But with Nvidia we are talking somewhere in the scale at tens or hundreds of billions. And that is actually very large sums of money. Even if it often does not look like it.
They are also talking out of their asses, as they are massively overselling their capacity, and everyone is on a 5 to 10 year backlog.
It’s not circular because we put a little bit of money in, and a lot of money comes back
My name is Charles Ponzi and I approve of this message.
Your salaries if AI works (and takes your jobs), and your taxes if it doesn’t (bubble bursts, your taxes bail them out Becasue it’s too big to fail).
Mega eyeroll
God heavens. It's worse than 2000/2001!
Gotta start selling my portfolio