Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang은 AI 자본 지출 붐이 순환 금융을 나타낸다는 주장을 부정하고 있으며, 투자 정당성을 둘러싼 업계의 정밀 조사가 심화되고 있다.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has pushed back on claims that the chipmaker is effectively financing its own demand through its investment portfolio, telling the Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology Conference that the company's investments are too small relative to the business they generate to support the theory. The allegation, sometimes described as circular financing, centres on a pattern critics have identified across the AI industry: Nvidia invests in an AI company or cloud provider, that company then purchases Nvidia hardware, and the resulting revenue flows back to Nvidia. The concern is not that the underlying demand is fake, but that the accounting distinction between an investment and a genuine sale becomes difficult to separate.

The companies most often named in this discussion are OpenAI and CoreWeave. Nvidia is both an investor in and a commercial partner of OpenAI, while CoreWeave relies on Nvidia-supplied infrastructure and financial backing. The scale of the numbers involved is substantial. In January, Nvidia invested $2 billion into CoreWeave Class A shares at $87.20 each, alongside a plan to build more than 5 gigawatts of AI data centre capacity with CoreWeave by 2030. OpenAI subsequently announced a $110 billion funding round at a $730 billion pre-money valuation, with $30 billion coming from Nvidia, $30 billion from SoftBank, and $50 billion from Amazon. On August 10, Nvidia partnered with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR on platforms intended to mobilise more than $500 billion in third-party capital for AI infrastructure—a fundraising target rather than a direct Nvidia commitment.

Huang's central defence rests on reframing what a GPU represents commercially. "In AI, compute is revenue," he said, arguing that Nvidia's chips function as productive, revenue-generating assets rather than one-time hardware sales, which he says changes how the investment relationships should be read. Huang has previously stated that Nvidia does not use its investment capital to artificially sustain customers, instead evaluating each investment on its own commercial merits. In February, addressing earlier speculation about a possible $100 billion OpenAI investment, he stated "it was never a commitment," adding that Nvidia would invest "one step at a time."

Nvidia's SEC disclosures add weight to the concentration question, showing three direct customers accounted for 16%, 15%, and 13% of revenue in the first half of fiscal 2027. This customer concentration, regardless of how the investment structuring is characterised, gives the circular financing concern some statistical weight.

The scrutiny extends beyond Nvidia to the wider AI financing ecosystem. The IMF said in April that AI-related investments could face strain in a downturn, noting increased circular financing across the value chain, though it judged the financial stability impact minor at this stage. The Bank for International Settlements went further on September 10, warning that rising use of debt and private credit to fund AI capital spending could contribute to a larger financial shock if returns fail to materialise as expected. Neither flagged Nvidia specifically, instead identifying growing reliance on debt and private credit across the broader AI value chain.

The stakes are considerable given the scale of the buildout: S&P Global estimates the five largest hyperscalers may spend a combined $5.3 trillion in capital expenditure through 2030, while Stanford's 2026 AI Index puts global AI compute capacity at the equivalent of 17.1 million H100 GPUs, with Nvidia accounting for more than 60% of that total. For now, the debate looks more reputational than financial for Nvidia specifically, but any sign that hyperscaler capital expenditure plans are slowing would likely reignite scrutiny of the financing structure. The underlying question—whether genuine end-user demand is keeping pace with the financing, orders, and valuations being layered on top of it—remains unresolved and is likely to keep resurfacing as the buildout continues.