By Milena Thomas
Publication Date: 2026-10-24 12:54:00
Nvidia turns lender-in-chief to push more GPUs
After building the chips that kicked off the generative AI boom, Nvidia is now using its balance sheet to help fund the companies that need those chips. CEO Jensen Huang’s playbook is to put in capital, help customers access loans, and lean on the firm’s investment grade rating so mega projects borrow more cheaply.
By July, Nvidia had arranged $36 billion of off-balance-sheet AI cloud agreements that serve as guarantees for neocloud partners. In August, it laid out more than $500 billion of off-balance-sheet promises slated over the next several years, most of which come due by fiscal 2029. Huang summed up the pivot in August, saying, “We used to build chips that we sell,” and, “now, Nvidia’s AI factory platform is really an investable asset.” On a podcast last week he added, “We’re the most rentable. We’re fungible, and we’re durable.”
Demand, he says, is not the bottleneck. Huang told CNBC this week that interest in neoclouds is “off the charts,” and said in Berlin that what is missing is “the working capital to fuel that growth,” because “there’s just so much demand across so many sectors of AI, there’s a scarcity of capital.” Nvidia declined to comment otherwise.
Nvidia’s cash flow is a key edge. Its equity holdings were marked at $99 billion at the end of the second quarter. Revenue in the latest fiscal year reached $216 billion, roughly eight times higher since ChatGPT launched in late 2022.
Across the first six months…