[NVIDIA Company Meeting, the present day, YMCA playing]
JENSEN HUANG: We love NVIDIA, don’t we folks? We’re the biggest, most-beautiful semiconductor company, we make the biggest, hottest GPUs for Clammy Sammy and Wario Amodei’s huge, beautiful AI labs, but they can’t afford them because they’re losing so much money! [crowd booing]
It’s okay! It’s okay! Big strong men, the biggest muscles, big, beautiful, strong men like Satya Nadella are calling me, begging — they’re begging, can you believe it? — they’re begging me, “Sir, Sir, please ship me Vera Rubin sir! I can’t get enough!” [crowd braying] they can’t get enough of Vera Rubin! They’re begging me to get Vera over there! Vera! Where’s Vera! [scanning crowd] get her up here! No, no, don’t do it, she’s too shy!
We love Grace too, [voice turning gravely] Grace Blackwell, what a gal! I told them all we’re going to ship a trillion dollars of Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin by the end of 2027, our beautiful girls Grace and Vera, they’re our biggest and most-expensive girls yet, our Gee-Pee-Yous, the media says “we don’t believe you sir!” but I’m gonna make everyone buy ‘em, hell I’m gonna give ‘em the money to do it like I did with CoreWeave and then I’m gonna tell Clammy Sammy and say “Samuel, give ‘em a few billion like you gave to Michael Intrator,” and he’ll say “yes sir!”
Now, people are saying to me — “Sir! Sir! Your customers can’t afford your semiconductors! Sir, they’re too expensive!” and I say they’re not expensive enough! We’re gonna charge ‘em 17% more! [crowd braying] Should we up the price? Should we do it? We’re gonna do it!
In my mind, this is how Jensen Huang speaks to his workers, more than 70% of whom are millionaires as a result of NVIDIA’s remarkable stock growth, and from what I’m told by insiders, there’s a near-manic attention paid to stock movements as a result. I imagine working there must feel a little insane.
Assuming you arrived before the stock went parabolic in 2024, you’ve seen your RSUs explode 10x in the space of a few years, all based on the back of everybody talking about how big and huge AI is…
…all as it becomes blatantly obvious that NVIDIA’s biggest customers are, for the most part, funded by NVIDIA.
While NVIDIA still ostensibly sells things other than AI GPUs (like autonomous cars, laptop graphics cards, and simulation technology for robotics), more than 90% of its revenue comes from data center hardware. As a result, the company has become almost-entirely valued on whether or not it can continually come up with rationalizations for its largest customers to spunk tens of billions of dollars a quarter.
Why else would NVIDIA invest even an iota of effort into making an NVIDIA-branded Openclaw or build a platform for LLMs to do “agentic” things, or give $6 billion to Poolside (while investing another $1 billion) and hire away most of its staff? Why else would it plan to invest billions of dollars in Perplexity at a $30 billion valuation that lands somewhere between “fucking stupid” and “laughable”?
Sorry, I’m being a little vague. Everything NVIDIA has done for the last three years has existed to do two things:
- Create sales for its AI GPUs and associated hardware.
- Create demand for AI compute for its customers.
NVIDIA has succeeded in doing the first primarily by selling these GPUs to hyperscalers like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, and Meta, who make up somewhere between 50% and 60% of its GPU sales depending on which analyst you ask.
The rest comes from a mixture of unnamed “sovereign AI customers” and “neoclouds” — companies that exist to raise debt, buy NVIDIA GPUs, and put them in data centers to rent to theoretical AI customers. Per Vivek Arya of Bank of America (at the BoFA Global Technology Conference in June), sales to “neocloud/sovereign/on-premise” were about the same as those to hyperscalers, and while it’s tempting to dither here and say “there could be large sovereign buildouts!” I can’t find compelling evidence that these actually exist outside of a theoretical 75 billion Euro investment in AI infrastructure in France by SoftBank, which doesn’t have that much money to spend.
In any case, NVIDIA’s entire strategy has become a case of either convincing the largest companies in the world to give Jensen Huang $100 billion a year or artificially inflating its revenues through circular financing, which is obviously what I’m talking about today.
This is the first part of my Hater’s Guide To Circular Financing, a comprehensive analysis of the current state of NVIDIA’s massive circular financing operation, why it has yet to break, its limitations, and the material concerns that were raised in its latest quarterly earnings.
The second part, coming next week, will cover the history of circular financing, where we’ve seen it before, and what we can learn from its horrible past.
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