Nvidia is edging towards its most entangled arrangement yet with a single customer, and the structure is as revealing as the sums.
The chipmaker is in advanced talks to guarantee $250 billion of financing for a 10 gigawatt data-centre project in Ohio, being developed by SoftBank and leased to OpenAI.
A separate deal would see Nvidia help finance OpenAI's purchase of its own chips and data-centre equipment for the site, potentially worth a further $350 billion.
The logic runs in a circle that is becoming the defining feature of this boom.
Nvidia backs the financing, OpenAI builds the centre, and the centre is filled with Nvidia hardware bought partly with Nvidia's help.
The upside for Nvidia
For the chipmaker there are real attractions beyond the immediate sales.
The arrangement would bind Nvidia more tightly to one of the world's leading developers of frontier artificial intelligence models.
That matters at a moment when new factory capacity may finally let rivals chip away at Nvidia's dominance, since locking in OpenAI blunts that competitive threat.
The project also carries an unusual political dimension.
Funding comes from Japan under a recent United States and Japanese agreement, while power is controlled by the American government, giving Washington a direct stake in seeing it built.
Where the risk lies
The circularity is also the danger.
By guaranteeing financing tied to its own customer, Nvidia takes on exposure to OpenAI's fortunes.
If AI demand slows, or if OpenAI falls behind its competitors, the chipmaker is left underwriting a bet that has soured.
Such vendor financing flatters revenue on the way up and concentrates risk on the way down, a trade-off that grows more acute the larger these guarantees become.
Wedbush takes a broadly positive view, seeing continued large data-centre builds, and Nvidia's central place within them, as favourable for the leading supplier of AI accelerators.
The reporting on the talks was carried by the Wall Street Journal.
