stale2002 4 days ago

Does anyone in the finance business know how legal this all it? I am hearing terms like "round tripping" being thrown around. A practice where a company sells and buys back its own product to artificially inflate revenue.

I'm asking because its not just OpenAI that they are apparently doing this with, instead its with multiple other major GPU providers, like Coreweave.

And its just being done all out in the open? How?

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wmf 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

IANAL but you can do pretty much anything as long as it's disclosed. The only problem with round-tripping is doing it secretly.

As an investor you may decide that round-tripping is dumb but in that case your recourse is to sell the stock.

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raincole 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

First of all, it's not 'textbook round tripping' at all. The parent commenter is dead wrong but HNers upvote when they see "AI is a bubble."

Textbook round tripping is like: OpenAI buys GPUs from Nvidia. And the only reason it buys these GPUs is to resell it back to Nvidia, or just do nothing. It doesn't make it round tripping just because OpenAI is taking investment and buying stuff from Nvidia at the same time.

Unless you really believe OpenAI has no intention to use these GPUs for other purposes (like training GPT-6. I know, a crazy idea: OpenAI will train and release a model), it's not round tripping.

	▲	stale2002 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Its not just about OpenAI, though. Even though they have the biggest/flashiest deal. The other more obvious example is coreweave. > OpenAI buys GPUs from Nvidia. And the only reason it buys these GPUs is to resell it back to Nvidia Funny you should say this. Nvidia having those GPUs be rented back to them is also something thats happening. https://www.kerrisdalecap.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Ker... "As detailed by The Information, in early 2023 Nvidia invested $100 million in equity and signed a $1.3 billion rental agreement through 2027, under which it rents back GPUs from CoreWeave to support internal R&D and its DGX cloud offering." "CoreWeave is not the only neocloud to benefit from Nvidia’s strategic support. Nvidia has actively supported an ecosystem of emerging AI infrastructure providers – including Lambda, Nebius, and Applied Digital –" They are quite literally buying GPUs only to rent them right back to Nvidia. And these are just the public deals. Is Nvidia systematically selling GPUs and having them be rented back to, by every major GPU cloud providers? https://www.investing.com/analysis/coreweave-nvidia-partners... "This deep alliance culminates in the new $6.3 billion agreement. The deal’s most critical component is a strategic commitment from NVIDIA to purchase any of CoreWeave’s unsold cloud computing capacity through April 2032"

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yard2010 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

How I see it - the people with the money make the rules, why would they make rules against themselves?

	▲	stale2002 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, but my point is that this almost feels like an Enron case. Things were fine, until they weren't. And then in retrospect the fraud is obvious. I'm just surprised that nobody is yelling to the rooftops about practices that are just so out in the open right now.