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.
- 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?
With just these 2 comments, now I'm really gonna read that article.
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.
Financing is circular because creating a liability for one party (debt) creates an asset for another (the bank) off of which more debt can be secured
A bank / financier sells trust and reassurance. They otherwise invent most money from thin air.
It may be fine, or not. It it has been a frequent type of manipulation to obfuscate the real accounting situation.
It is. The GPUs go on to be used to get loans to then get more GPUs.
https://www.currentmarketvaluation.com/models/s&p500-mean-re...