Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is done with the questions about circular financing.
Huang called it “ridiculous” to suggest that Nvidia’s latest deal, a $2 billion investment in CoreWeave, is the latest circular deal between AI chipmakers and tech companies, a trend that has sparked some concern among some investors.
“These are generational companies — the investments that we make is confidence in them,” Huang told Bloomberg News. “But it’s a small percentage of the amount of money that they ultimately have to go raise, and so the idea that it is circular is — it’s ridiculous.”
As part of the arrangement, Nvidia is expanding its previous investment in the cloud company by buying $2 billion worth of its shares. According to a joint statement, the money will assist CoreWeave’s “procurement of land, power, and shell to build AI factories.” The future AI factories will then be powered by Nvidia’s chips.
Huang portrayed the latest deal and past arrangements with the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Elon Musk’s xAI as just a small portion of what the companies need to raise to finance their massive AI expansion plans. For example, OpenAI is committed to spending roughly $1.4 trillion over the next eight years, largely on data centers.
“Whatever we decide to invest is a small percentage, very small percentage of the overall amount of infrastructure, capital they’re going to have to raise,” Huang told CNBC in a separate interview.
This is far from the first time Nvidia has bristled at concerns about its deals.
In November, the world’s largest company by market cap sent a letter to Wall Street analysts in response to investor Michael Burry of “The Big Short” fame, who has questioned whether Nvidia was on solid financial footing.
“Nvidia’s underlying business is economically sound, our reporting is complete and transparent, and we care about our reputation for integrity,” the memo said.
Burry has said he stands behind his analysis of the company, comparing it to one of Silicon Valley’s giants before the Dotcom crash.
“I am not claiming Nvidia is Enron,” he wrote on his Substack. “It is clearly Cisco.”
