SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — Chip-making giant Nvidia has inked a slew of new agreements across the last month – drawing fresh concern over the financing keeping the AI industry afloat.
Among the biggest, a $500 billion partnership with South Korean semiconductor company SK Hynix to secure AI memory for Nvidia’s next-gen processors. The deal also promises the construction of a 2-gigawatt data center expected to become operational in 2027.
Additionally, Nvidia has agreed to backstop as much as $250 billion to help the firm lease computing power. That’s according to Bloomberg.
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The same article reports the company is separately discussing $350 billion in financing with OpenAI for the purchases of its newest chips in a massive 10-gigawatt data center in Ohio.
Other smaller recent investments include a $1 billion investment in Nacver Corp to finish an AI data center in South Korea, and another $5 billion in startup Safe Superintelligence – co-founded by OpenAI’s former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever.
This type of behavior is not new.
Back in 2023, Nvidia made one of it’s first big transactions in this manner – an initial investment of $100 million in CoreWeave. CoreWeave later secured an order worth at least $6.3 billion from Nvidia in 2025, and another $2 billion investment at the start of 2026.
By investing in CoreWeave, which builds data centers that require Nvidia’s latest processors, Nvidia funds its own demand – a strategy often referred to as circular financing.
“The demand for AI infrastructure is unquestionably real, but financing arrangements of this scale can make demand appear even stronger than it actually is,” said Ahmed Banafa, a professor with San Jose State’s college of engineering, and the school’s foremost expert on AI.
“When companies help finance their customers’ purchases, some future demand is effectively brought forward into today’s market. That doesn’t mean the demand is fake, but it does mean investors should distinguish between organic customer demand and demand supported by complex financing structures.”
The chip-maker has dotted similar deals with almost every major player in the AI industry including Oracle, SpaceX, Intel, AMD, Anthropic, Google, Broadcom, and Microsoft among others.
Today’s boom, and the money behind it, frequently draws comparison to the early 2000s “dot-com bubble,” when telecom companies helped customers finance major purchases to fuel growth, and firms repeatedly IPO’d with little regard for profitability.
