Nvidia Corporation Defends AI Financing Amid Antitrust Pauses
Nvidia Corporation is providing billions in financing to AI startups and data centers while pausing some deals due to antitrust and regulatory concerns.
Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang and Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress have defended a strategy of providing massive financial support to AI startups and data center projects to secure long-term demand. Following fiscal second-quarter results where revenue more than doubled to $96.2 billion, the company revealed it has invested nearly $50 billion in frontier AI labs and partnered with Wall Street firms to arrange up to $500 billion in data center financing.
A centerpiece of this strategy is a planned 10-gigawatt data center in Portsmouth, Ohio, developed by SB Energy Global Holdings Ltd. Nvidia Corporation agreed to backstop up to $105 billion of the project's value, with OpenAI expected to purchase $350 billion in chips for the full build-out. Huang and Kress rejected allegations of circular financing, arguing that the investments support once-in-a-generation companies during a major computing platform shift.
However, the company has recently paused several deals under its AI Compute Partnership, a credit support initiative for AI cloud providers. This pause follows internal warnings regarding potential antitrust scrutiny and disputes over the level of control the company exerts over customers' business practices. Nvidia Corporation also scaled back financial support for the OpenAI project in Ohio, suggesting a shift to limit concentrated liability and regulatory risk. Despite these challenges, the company is reportedly acquiring AI hosting platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion and guiding fiscal 2028 revenue growth to approximately 70%.
