Nvidia introduces revenue-sharing financing option: cloud customers pay Nvidia a cut of inference revenue instead of upfront GPU costs.

Nvidia has announced a new business model allowing it to generate revenue on two fronts from the same hardware: once through product sales and again as a percentage of the revenue that the hardware generates. In a blog post co-authored by CFO Colette Kress, the company positioned the "revenue-sharing and credit-support model" as a mechanism to provide compute access to startups unable to finance infrastructure themselves.

Under this structure, participating AI cloud providers procure Nvidia infrastructure and sell Nvidia-powered services to end customers. Nvidia collects standard product revenue on the hardware plus a percentage of the cloud income earned from that capacity—a recurring, usage-linked earnings stream. Developers receive token credits in exchange for a share of their future sales, though neither Nvidia nor its partners has publicly disclosed the revenue-split percentages.

The credit-support component addresses a financing challenge Nvidia itself has identified: even with signed, long-term customer commitments, lenders have been reluctant to fund large-scale deployments, leaving smaller cloud operators unable to secure financing against the demand they have already secured.

Australia's Sharon AI and Singapore-based Firmus Technologies are the first named partners. According to an 8-K filing dated June 12th, Sharon AI's agreement runs for six years and covers 72 megawatts of new Australian data center capacity built to Nvidia's DSX AI factory design, scaling to as many as 40,000 Grace Blackwell GB300 GPUs. The Nasdaq-listed company separately holds a revenue-share facility of up to $200 million with investor Digital Alpha, meaning portions of its income are now pledged in multiple directions. Firmus is constructing a DSX-aligned campus in Batam, Indonesia, expected to scale to 360 megawatts and house up to 170,000 Nvidia GPUs.

Nvidia has spent the past year channeling capital directly to customers, including a $30 billion participation in OpenAI's $110 billion funding round and backing for xAI's $20 billion Colossus 2 financing. The new model reverses this approach: rather than investing capital that returns as GPU orders, Nvidia extends credit support and collects a royalty on partners' sales for years forward.

This revenue stream ties a portion of Nvidia's income to utilization rather than hardware sales alone. If partner clouds cannot maintain full rack occupancy, the usage-linked revenue will shrink—a live concern given depreciation pressure already building on operators paying off hardware that Nvidia refreshes approximately annually.