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.

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"