When a bubble pops, the pop typically takes years to happen. It's more of a slow deflation in most cases. Afterwards, you can easily spot the peak that would never be reached again but, during a "pop", it's not clear if you're past that peak or if you're just experiencing a momentary blip on the path to new highs.

Nvidia is likely not going to surge back to $240 soon. It might go lower actually. Skeletons are still falling out of closets. Huang may have been the tech founder's tech founder, but he kept some pretty nasty company in recent years and, as we're now finding out, got both himself and his company into shady territory. As it turns out, ethics are not just for aesthetics.

Is Nvidia slowing down for a year or two bad for AI as a technology? Probably not. Nvidia could find a leader that will return them to top form, or another company could take advantage of the situation to catch up and surge past. A lot of AI researchers have been calling for a pause or, at the very least, a slow-down. This might be just what was needed.

However, given Nvidia's utterly unique position as both hardware supplier and bank for the data centre build-out, what will the impact be on the rest of the AI sector? The market is going to have to price in a weaker and slower build-out as well as a loss of trust in Nvidia. That's clear downwards pressure. Is it a blip, or are we now past the peak?

Yep. Slowly and all at once.

Then why am I having trouble getting the GPU capacity I need?

NVIDIA appears to have made $530 billion in commitments and guarantees as of last August: https://cellcog.ai/blog/nvidia-530-billion-commitments-guara...

17B sounds low.

> Corporate development-led AI equity investments alone exceeded $40 billion in just the first four months of 2026

The accusation in the headline is that this activity contributed to the general shortage of GPUs which would, if true, increase their pricing power and profit margins even on chips sold to other customers. So I don't think it's a direct comparison to their equity deals.

Is this the only reason Nvidia made money? No, obviously. But is it adding fuel to the fire? If there is a bubble will this make the fallout worse? Seems likely.

More importantly this suggests a second plausible reason the board might have wanted to wrest control of the company away from him. (The other hypothetical one being that he was doing illegal stuff.)

if circularly financed neoclouds are 5% and singapore china flow is another 12% things suddenly dont look so good

According to Gemini, Nvidia added $43 billion in direct equity stakes,$36 billion in AI compute partnerships, and $100+ billion in loan lease guarantees, which works out to $63 billion this year, $20 billion for the next 3 years, and $10 billion for the last 6 years based on it's assumptions.

So about a third, a sixth, and a twelth of their annual revenue respectively.

I think the larger concern is that both the revenue and assets/agreements depend on Nvidia maintaining sales, market share, and their share of capacity at TSMC/etc... If they run into trouble on any of those fronts, their revenue and assets could take hits from multiple directions.

No one seriously denies the actual activity was happening, they just dispute its implications, and for good reason. Vendors frequently extend financing with the hope of making more sales, the most obvious example being auto loans and BNPL

You might as well ask why they don't just keep all their GPUs and compete directly with Anthropic and OpenAI to make frontier models. The answer is the same, Nvidia's core competency is hardware and although they dabble up the stack they would rather stay focused on the GPU business. It also provides a degree of separation where they can bet on many different neoclouds and AI businesses, and some may fail but there will be survivors and winners.

Well, they own chunks of Coreweave and Nebius I think?

The scale is the largest factor, I think. If vendor financing is happening in a mature multi-vendor market on a small enough scale as to not constrain supply, it’s a less unhealthy situation than when there is only one vendor.