Nvidia's $750B in Deals Reignite Circular AI Fears

ppetethomas about 2 hours ago 49 commentsRead Article on bloomberg.com

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Discussion (49 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

randyrand•about 1 hour ago

Circular is a dumb way to describe it IMO, because it's not like both parties end up in the same place.

Nvidia is making trades for people to buy their GPUs.

Sometimes companies are trading stock for GPUs, sometimes money, other times something else.

In summary, Nvidia is selling GPUs.

thewebguyd•43 minutes ago

Right. The risk isn't accounting fraud, its the equity-to-debt loop that relies on all these companies making "enough money to pay it back someday."

Nvidia invests, that equity check gets used to secure 10x it in debt with the GPUs as collateral, and then they buy the chips.

Nvidia gets paid, so they don't hold the debt liability. But, if AI revenue doesn't cover those debt payments before the GPUs depreciate, the loop starts to unravel, and fast. CoreWeave, Oracle, all the "neoclouds" etc. will blow up, and there could potentially be a ton of PE debt that is now under-collateralized due to depreciation, causing a pretty big haircut to basically all of private credit.

spwa4•1 minute ago

But if there is one thing trivial to see then it is the connection between loaned money and stock prices AS A WHOLE.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01651...

It's stronger for momentum stocks, but it's not like something like a gold mine escapes from it either.

maxdo•5 minutes ago

why AI revenue will not cover?

Chinese models pushes prices down and quality up, that makes GPU-based automation more affordable, while covering more and more cases to automate.

You can debate that llm producers will go bankrupt, some of them at least for sure.

How do you lose in this market if you do gpu?

thewebguyd•1 minute ago

> How do you lose in this market if you do gpu?

You don't. Nvidia gets paid either way. They were never the ones in danger (outside of the buildout going bust and having a massive surplus of cheap, used GPUs flood the market).

> You can debate that llm producers will go bankrupt, some of them at least for sure.

And that's the risk that will cascade down and kill off a bunch of companies and cause a debt crisis. If (for example), OpenAI goes to Oracle and says "I promise I'll pay you, at some point in the future, $1T to build my datacenters" and then Oracle funds that build out with debt, and then OpenAI goes bust, or just doesn't make enough money or can't raise enough cash to start making payments on their IOU, Oracle now also can't pay their debt and will eventually go bust, and now the private credit market takes a huge haircut, potentially bankrupting entire funds (like what happened in '08).

no_op•33 minutes ago

Yeah, the "circular" language is obviously intended to imply unsustainability, as a system without external inputs must eventually run down. But this system is intended to have external inputs, revenue from customers that buy the services of the data centers. So the fundamental issue is just whether there will be enough such demand to justify the scale of the build-out.

These deals give Nvidia more exposure to that, in both directions. Certainly Nvidia shareholders should be cognizant of this. But nothing structurally problematic is occurring here.

Analemma_•about 1 hour ago

They're selling GPUs in exchange for scrip which may or may not be able to pay Nvidia's operating expenses depending on whether AI has a profitable business model. This isn't hard to understand.

thewebguyd•36 minutes ago

No, Nvidia is getting paid. Nvidia puts down a fraction of equity cash, and the recipients are taking that to PE to finance debt, using the GPUs as collateral. So Nvidia pays $1B, receiving company uses it to secure $10B in debt and buys $10B worth of GPUs.

Nvidia gets real cash, pays TSMC, etc.

The people in real trouble are companies like CoreWeave, Oracle, etc. that took an IOU from OpenAI (for example) to start a buildout, entirely debt financed. It works out so long as demand keeps going up, but the moment the music stops and that debt comes due and there's no revenue to pay it, game over.

Nvidia's concern isn't not actually getting paid, it's being faced with a glut of cheap, depreciated GPUs flooding the market impacting their future revenue. They'll live.

But OpenAI, not being able to pay CoreWeave, for example, that IOU, and then private credit coming for the debt payments from CoreWeave, is what would start the chain reaction. We may actually get to live to see Oracle fall.

georgemcbay•about 1 hour ago

Its only a problem if you think about it, just don't think about it and no problem!

randyrand•about 1 hour ago

It's only a problem if you dont think about it.

amazingamazing•35 minutes ago

Nope. The simplest rebuttal to all of this is: why dont they pay cash?

Marciplan•about 1 hour ago

are you just heavily invested in Nvidia to not see this as problematic?

ar_lan•43 minutes ago

We all are, mostly.

wonnage•about 1 hour ago

Looks like you discovered an infinite money glitch! As long as you’re selling things at a profit, all you need to do is take those profits and give them to your customers to buy more things, repeat the loop a few times and you can become a billionaire food vlogger just like Jensen

thewebguyd•26 minutes ago

> all you need to do is take those profits and give them to your customers to buy more things

Those customers aren't buying Nvidia chips with Nvidia's money. They're using Nvidia's equity check to finance debt, and then using debt to buy the GPUs. Nvidia invests $1B in someone like CoreWeave, CoreWeave then takes that check, goes to PE a borrows $10B w/ the GPUs as collateral. Nvidia basically paid $1B to get $10B in sales, and now CoreWeave is saddled with debt based on an IOU from the AI labs.

Nvidia is insulated from the debt exposure, but the companies doing the datacenter build outs are the ones in real trouble if the house of cards comes falling down.

mhitza•about 1 hour ago

Alternative source https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/nvidia-plan...

> The concern is familiar: NVIDIA money funds customers who then buy NVIDIA chips.

fsuts•16 minutes ago

I imagine nvidia is securing these loans on the hardware being bought?

So if the company defaults they can take the GPUs and servers etc and sell those.

jdalgetty•about 1 hour ago

At what point do I start taking money out of my VTI holdings and parking it in cash - there is no way the market keeps going up.

jshen•about 1 hour ago

First, don't park it in actual cash or you'll lose value to inflation which is currently running high. At a minimum put it in treasuries.

Second, trying to time the market is almost always a suboptimal strategy. The question is when will you likely need the money? If you won't need it for 10 years or more, keep it in index funds. Otherwise, treasuries.

ericpauley•about 1 hour ago

Personally I tend to assume anyone talking about VTI knows about the risk-free rate.

rjh29•31 minutes ago

Historically even if you invest into index at the worst possible time (prior to a crash) and keep holding you still outperform inflation long term. Timing the market is impossible. Just keep an emergency fund in a money market or savings account and hold the rest.

fullshark•about 1 hour ago

Just need a larger emergency fund to mitigate the risk, especially if you work in tech and you feel the crash would heavily impact your labor earnings (including possibly extended unemployment)

pianopatrick•30 minutes ago

There is no law that prices must revert to a mean.

The market can keep going up in dollar terms while losing real value if we enter a phase of high inflation.

lotsofpulp•9 minutes ago

> there is no way the market keeps going up.

There is no way the US’s leaders let the prices of publicly traded securities go down or even stagnate relative to the US dollar. These publicly traded securities make up a significant portion of the US leaders’ and most active voters’ assets, plus almost all state and local US governments depend on the securities’ price growth to meet their deferred compensation obligations.

The alternative to risk in US securities isn’t the USD, it’s a stake in other stable countries with resources.

scrappyjoe•about 1 hour ago

Park it in BRK?

nickff•about 1 hour ago

BRK has been roughly flat since the beginning of 2025; you might be better off in bonds or money markets (depending on your beliefs about near-term inflation).

bryanlarsen•about 1 hour ago

BRK is 40% cash at the moment. I think "roughly flat" is evidence they're performing the strategy the OP wanted.

BRK has stated that they'll buy back in when prices are reasonable again, so it's an automatic "sell-high buy-low" strategy.

niklasd•about 1 hour ago

Not that I have any skills in stock-picking whatsoever, but couldn't the recent lukewarm performance not also be an argument for BRK?

I mean their cash pile is also invested in money markets (so you get that), and the rest of the portfolio consists of quality companies where their (combined) valuation didn't explode in the last 1,5 years. So it's an opportunity to invest into something that might not be overheated.

mohamedkoubaa•32 minutes ago

Market goes up when the dollar crashes you're fine

red-iron-pine•19 minutes ago

already did mate, after Trumps first pump and dump with Iran

what's your risk tolerance?

DougN7•about 1 hour ago

It’s such an obvious Ponzi scheme the companies should get delisted.

gla67890543•36 minutes ago

OPEN AI is living true to their name and foundation principles. Non profit and NO PROFIT, lol.

NegatioN•about 1 hour ago

https://archive.is/epMTs

renegade-otter•about 2 hours ago

They are just adding zeros to already obnoxious numbers that make no sense. The endgame is on.

joaquieneCnix•about 1 hour ago

DRAM will get to the moon before we get ...

theideaofcoffee•about 1 hour ago

It's come to a point (or has it passed it) that these numbers are completely meaningless. One hundred billion here, $750B there, $1.2T over a year or so, toss in $300B for a few hyperscalers there. There's no imaginable scenario where these are actually backed up with real profit to where the investments make sense. Just passing the same hundred dollar bill among everyone and all booking it as revenue. I can't wait until it pops.

gdulli•about 1 hour ago

Displacing a vast amount of labor is what makes the numbers make sense. We don't know if they'll succeed or not, but it's obviously what they're chasing.

In addition to actual lost jobs, replacing a skilled white collar worker with a fungible operator of AI lowers the salary for that role significantly.

dofm•27 minutes ago

The labour needs to be eliminated — essentially nobody in the economy paying them for an equivalent job — for enough money to be freed up for it to work. But then these people who are either unemployed or job sharing some remaining work don’t have the money to buy the products of all the AI companies’ customers. At the necessary scale it will trigger economic demand collapse.

The whole idea is impossible.

lopsotronic•28 minutes ago

Have they thought about the expenses in running continental Death Pits?

OK, dumb attempt at funny over, but certainly someone is thinking about instability costs? Even if everyone is super cool with literal Death Pits, they don't run for free. And not everyone will be cool with watching their entire family die, which will mean substantial costs in security - and money spent on security, that's just setting money on fire, that money doesn't work any more.

I know they've batted around the ideas of "compliance collars" and suchlike for the guys running the Death Pits, but I haven't seen anything that wouldn't be ultimately defeated by a typical zoo chimpanzee, let alone a psychopathic Delta Force guy with more advanced degrees than your entire family. He will not be pleased with your "compliance collar" thing.

And the brain control chips they've been trying to get working . . well, they're not ready yet. You'll just make the Delta Force guy even crazier .

bwfan123•about 2 hours ago

I guess it gets bigger with each passing day. Tens of billions goes to Hundreds of billions.

vannevar•about 1 hour ago

It has to get bigger. As soon as it starts shrinking, the next round of debt will no longer be able to cover the prior round of commitments. What is happening in AI is essentially a gigantic version of what is happening in consumer auto loans, they just keep refinancing for more and more money. Eventually there will be no one willing to lend them more, and then they'll go to the government to bail them out.

ryandvm•about 1 hour ago

Yeah, I'm pretty sure we've already passed some sort of fiscal singularity where economic and political interests are so intertwined that there can only be growth. If there ever isn't growth, then the legislators (who are elected via corporate sponsorship) will pull whatever levers necessary to make sure that there will always be asset growth.

It's some sort of tragic positive feedback loop that isn't going to stop until the whole thing comes crashing down for everyone and we're paying $37,000 for a loaf of bread.

apercu•about 1 hour ago

I'm not sure a government can bail out these irrational companies and have it not be political suicide.

fullshark•about 1 hour ago

I'd kill my political career for the private sector rewards sure to follow.

SoftTalker•about 1 hour ago

Those companies are already roundly hated by the general voting public, so I agree.

meangenehackman•about 1 hour ago

It is far better for society when companies like Nvidia spend their money rather horde it like Apple.

Nobody (including the dragon) benefits from sitting on piles of gold.

pinkyboy•about 1 hour ago

Apple is a $5t company that has $45b cash-on-hand.

Your post is "cute", but 3 or 4 months of operating cash isn't a great example of "sitting on piles of gold".