nobody would scream circular financing because of this. it's only circular if those companies would then be investing (directly or indirectly) in nvidia.

this however does scream "manufactured demand" - if the terms of your financing dictates that the money is used to purchase your own product.

▲ londons_explore 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It can also be a way to make the numbers look bigger for everyone...

Rather than sell a GPU at $500, instead you put the price up to $2000 but then invest in a startup on condition 80% of the investment is used to buy your hardware at inflated prices.

Arguably this is what's happening to 'datacenter' GPU's which are far more expensive than consumer ones for similar performance.

	▲	andsoitis 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Arguably this is what's happening to 'datacenter' GPU's which are far more expensive than consumer ones for similar performance What's an example of a datacenter GPU that has the same performance of a retail GPU but sold at a much steeper price?
	▲	dannyw 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Are they still? At latest retail prices of 5090s, the economics don't seem to reflect that much of a discount; especially when you consider the half-rate BF16/FP16/etc accumulation (which has not been hacked/unlocked yet). Even 5060 Ti 16GBs are at 1.8x MSRP.

▲ aurareturn 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

  nobody would scream circular financing because of this.

Majority would actually. See comments to my post.

  this however does scream "manufactured demand" - if the terms of your financing dictates that the money is used to purchase your own product.

This is nothing new. Intel Capital has invested $20b over its lifetime to boost Foundry and x86 ecosystem.

Salesforce Ventures has invested $7b in more than 700 companies to boost its ecosystem.

I didn't see people calling this manufactured demand or circular financing.