Nvidia dramatically reduces amount of OpenAI infra financing it may guarantee
113 points - yesterday at 9:07 PM
SourceNvidia is turning into a savings and loan company that happens to design computer chips on the side. What could possibly go wrong.
The loans will just take longer to repay. There is a market for Anthropic & OpenAI, it just likely doesn't have the 200B profit each year required for the maths to make sense.
If shit hits the fan, the companies collapse, then Nvidia gets their money from the investors anyways.
NV might end up owning them.
I'm hoping when the shit hits the fan, you can get a sick GPU for cheap.
u1hcw9nx
yesterday at 10:06 PM
I would like to see the numbers.
If Nvidia sells hardware for $100B with 75% cross margin, and provides $50 billion in backstop for that same hardware, it would be still be nicely profitable deal ($25B) if the backstop capacity would be a total write-off recovering $0. Reselling that capacity in some large discount below already low backstop price would increase the profits.
It's all those pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and Softbank getting into that $500 billion deal that will be hurt.
ColdStream
yesterday at 11:53 PM
Pretty much, I have said it for a while now, Softbank and Oracle are the ones I would be worried about. Both of them have put their companies wealth behind this, if it goes down so will they.
Others have played it fairly smart in terms of insulating potential issues.
throwaway27448
today at 12:02 AM
A better world is just a few steps away
SoftBank has always managed to squeeze by after every mistake selling some early huge wins Alibaba, Nvidia, arm. Wonder if they still have any of those left in the back pocket.
jgalt212
today at 12:55 AM
Indeed, Masa has more lives than a cat.
NewJazz
yesterday at 10:19 PM
Businesses aim to make the most profit possible with their resources. If they can make a 25% margin that is good, but if they can turn around sell thr same thing for a 50% margin, that is much better.
Basically what i am saying is maybe there is a better buyer than openai.
Taikhoom10
today at 1:31 AM
This is meaningless in the long run; the broader problem is the constant circular financing and "Fake profits".
It is not the first time, either; the capital cycle will prevail.
https://s-1.vercel.app/posts/the-capital-cycle-theory/
All economics is circular financing, that's how it works.
You pay Apple for a MacBook, Apple uses it to develop a better MacBook.
What goes wrong is leverage. We haven't seen much hint of the 10x leverage kind of deals that brought down the house in 2008.
Taikhoom10
today at 1:55 AM
Uh no, NVDIA helping startups get financing so they can buy NVDIA chips is inherently damaging because eventually the debtors will not help with the financing and startups will not be able to buy chips.
Again, this is how all of economics works.
A Toyota dealership arranges a loan for you. Through a bank for a used vehicle, sometimes through Toyota itself for new cars.
A house builder will routinely take on part of the loan providing burden to get some of the interest.
Even someone selling you their thirty year old house will often provide seller financing.
You may have ideological opinions against this, which is fine. There are billions of people, for example that are fundamentally opposed to the idea of interest. But like it or not, this is how it has worked for the last ~500ish years.
senor_digimon
today at 12:32 AM
This is probably a lot more related to the fact they want to make GPUs an asset class. Nvidia is banking on the fact there will be an entire market that will guarantee whatever anyone needs.
behnamoh
yesterday at 11:02 PM
In other words: the investments that were never going to happen are not going to happen.
ColdStream
today at 12:03 AM
While it is true they haven't lost anything, it does signal to shareholders, potential share holders and current VC's the direction of things.
gymbeaux
yesterday at 11:37 PM
What would happen to Nvidia, Anthropic, OpenAI, if tomorrow someone released an open weights model on HuggingFace that matched performance and accuracy of Opus 5 running locally on an RTX 5070? That won’t happen tomorrow, but it will likely happen someday… what’s the plan beyond “don’t be the one holding the bags?”
probably not all that much... the market would dip, just like every time a new open weights model gets announced. but hundreds of millions of people aren't going to immediately self-hosting their own models.
the biggest winner in that scenario would be ai providers, who suddenly have a capable model that they can serve much more efficiently. and the incumbents have a whole lot of compute. wouldn't anthropic and openAI just start offering that open weights model at prices that nobody else could compete with?
They could but then their valuation is no longer justifiable, which breaks a lot of things downstream (loans being the biggie). They'd rather lose money than start making money in a non defensible way.
jkahrs595
today at 2:22 AM
Workloads will inflate just as they have been. Remember when llm assisted development used to be good only for a function, then a whole file, then a handful of files, then a code base, then a full stack, etc etc etc.
People will claim to have “enough” even though they already have the equivalent of last years capabilities locally.
There’s no reason to assume frontier-level intelligence eventually collapses all the way onto a midrange consumer GPU. In fact, there are quite a few reasons not to assume that (information-theoretic constraints, etc).
christophilus
today at 1:41 AM
But, it could happen for a coding-focused model, or an accounting-focused model, etc. most tasks only need a subset of the total model to be done effectively.
There's no information theoretic constraint we know of that prevents this. You will almost surely win a Turing award if you can prove this.
It's almost a given that whatever is frontier intelligence today will run on a potato in a few years.
Kinda silly to follow your “prove it” challenge with an absurd claim you most certainly cannot prove, much less support with evidence.
It was not a "prove it" challenge.
I'm pointing out that there's no known information theoretic constraint about the impossibility of frontier AI models being improved to fit/run on a small GPU.
Please do not make up plausible sounding science facts.
amazingamazing
today at 2:25 AM
I will not claim a 5070, but there is already evidence in nature that you can get very good general intelligence with an order of magnitude less wattage.
There are constraints of course- training takes way longer.
> on an RTX 5070
RTX 5070 prices go up ~N times. Nvidia makes more money because it's easier to make these things than it's to make a GB300.
ColdStream
today at 12:06 AM
Those companies will be quick to copy the tech, inference cost would plummet and there is a greater chance that these companies could make it to solvency. At least in the short term. Long term it might not be so great as consume hardware catches up.
If you could run Opus 5 on a 5070 then the labs must have achieved RSI at that point
martinald
yesterday at 11:49 PM
Nothing would really change IMO? 99% of users don't have anything like a RTX5070 (mobile especially).
Even if it did, it still doesn't make much economic sense running a model locally vs on a datacentre.
For example, I managed to just about squeeze a Q2 quant of Qwen 3.7 27b on my 9070XT. I get around 60tps decode (slightly faster prefill). _but_ it uses 300W of power to do so. At UK electricity rates of 30c/kWh this works out at something like 42c/MTok. I can get far far better models on openrouter cheaper than that, plus I'm not horrendously constrained on context length.
protocolture
today at 12:22 AM
I dunno a lot of things said about AI economics sound like an IBM executive making reassuring statements about their terminal/mainframe business before the personal computer took off.
Like even if you run it in a datacenter in this scenario, you could do it on a cheap GPU instance in Azure, you still wouldnt need OpenAI or Anthropic specific clouds.
>uses 300W of power to do so.
There are plenty of people with phat electricity pipes in their on prem server rooms that have been vacated for cloud. Companies who want the benefits of AI but dont want the risk of sending their data to foreign API endpoints.
It seems very very unlikely that an Opus 5 matching local model that runs on a 5070 will be released within the next 5 years (I don't want to say "ever").
If it does happen then NVidia will sell a lot of 5070s though!
milkshakes
today at 12:05 AM
inference is the cheap part; training is expensive. what compute infrastructure would train this mythical magic model?
ElProlactin
today at 1:05 AM
Exactly. If OpenAI and Anthropic didn't have to train new models, they'd (probably) be instantly profitable and with good margins.
drivebyhooting
today at 12:17 AM
Inference time scaling means whoever had the most compute has the highest intelligence model.
d_sem
yesterday at 11:44 PM
I guess I'd like to understand the technical reasoning on how you think an how an Opus 5 could over time fit on an RTX 5070.
Noaidi
yesterday at 10:18 PM
The Möbius strip of AI financing continues…
sidewndr46
yesterday at 11:29 PM
it seems much more like Relativity by M. C. Escher where no one is quite sure how to exit without bringing everything down with them?
formvoltron
yesterday at 10:51 PM
wobble wobble
nian2326076
yesterday at 10:25 PM
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2773738384
yesterday at 9:55 PM
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