Nvidia does not just sell the picks and shovels of the AI boom. Increasingly, it guarantees the loans that buy them. The Journal’s Heard on the Street column added up those promises and reached a number worth writing down: roughly $230 billion.
Start with the biggest strand of the web. Nvidia backstops a $105 billion lease for OpenAI’s data-center project in Ohio. A backstop — a promise to pay if the borrower cannot — costs nothing up front. It only becomes a bill when things go wrong.
There is more. A $500 billion chip-financing plan with asset managers includes up to $125 billion of residual-value guarantees from Nvidia. A residual-value guarantee is a promise that used gear will still be worth a set amount later. If the chips age badly, Nvidia covers the gap.
Smaller strands round out the web: a $4.9 billion minimum-revenue guarantee for Sharon AI, and a $6.3 billion deal covering CoreWeave’s unsold computing capacity. Add $72.5 billion of stakes in other companies. The customers, in other words, are also the investments.
| Strand of the web | Size |
|---|---|
| OpenAI Ohio lease backstop | $105 billion |
| Residual-value guarantees (inside $500B financing plan) | up to $125 billion |
| Sharon AI minimum-revenue guarantee | $4.9 billion |
| CoreWeave unsold-capacity deal | $6.3 billion |
| Stakes in other companies | $72.5 billion |
| Cash on hand | $80 billion+ |
The industry is leaning too
The promises stretch well beyond one company. Big Tech is carrying $904 billion of signed leases that have not even started yet, plus $1.52 trillion in purchase commitments. Those are tomorrow’s bills for the buildout now under way, and they sit outside most headline earnings numbers.
The Lucent memory
There is a name for a seller financing its own customers: vendor financing. Lucent Technologies ran the same play in the telecom boom. It helped customers pay for its equipment, and sales looked wonderful — until the customers failed.
The ending was slow and expensive. The SEC acted against Lucent in 2004. In 2006 the company merged with Alcatel, and about one-third of the workforce was cut. Vendor financing did not cause the telecom bust. It just guaranteed the seller shared in it.
The other side of the ledger
To be fair, Nvidia is not fragile. It holds more than $80 billion in cash, and the $72.5 billion of stakes are assets, not just risks. Every promise on the list becomes a bill only if AI demand stalls. The web is a bet that it will not.
But that is the point worth remembering. The AI trade’s biggest seller is now also its lender, its guarantor, and its shareholder. When one company plays all four parts, its blowout quarters stop being an independent test of demand — and independent tests are what investors actually pay for.
The timing gives the question weight. Nvidia shares rose 2.2% ahead of its earnings report, snapping the stock’s longest losing streak since 2022. The market wanted good news and expected it. Guarantees are what a company writes when it wants the good news to keep coming.
Here is the homework for a careful investor. A guarantee costs nothing the day it is signed, so it never dents a blowout quarter. It surfaces later, all at once, in the quarter when a customer stumbles. Reading the promises now is how you avoid being surprised then.