🦔Nvidia announced agreements yesterday with the six biggest names in private capital, Apollo, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield, Goldman Sa…

🦔Nvidia announced agreements yesterday with the six biggest names in private capital, Apollo, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR, to raise over $500 billion so its own customers can buy Nvidia chips. These are memorandums of understanding, with final terms still to come. Jensen Huang is calling GPUs a new investable asset class, like real estate or toll roads. The financing lets OpenAI and others buy hardware without putting it on their balance sheets. My Take I flagged Nvidia's customer financing back in July. This is that same idea, now at 60 times the size. Lucent and Nortel ran this exact play in the late 1990s, when they lent customers the money to buy equipment they couldn't otherwise afford. Both ended in the largest corporate bankruptcies of their day. The vendor lends to keep its own revenue up, the sales look strong for a while, and the risk stacks up on the buyer's side of the ledger. We have seen how the story ends. I don't buy the idea that a GPU is an asset like a toll road. A toll road still earns money in 30 years. A GPU is close to worthless in five, and Nvidia's own next chip crushes the resale price of the last one. So they want pension funds and insurers to lend half a trillion dollars against hardware that ages like fruit, and the six firms who put the deal together collect their fees up front no matter how it turns out. Huang keeps his sales up and hands the downside to whoever holds the paper. I have watched this movie twice now, and the vendor never ends up holding the bag. Everyone downstream does. Hedgie🤗

Source: Gary Marcus (X) | 2026-08-11

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