Premium: The Hater's Guide To Circular Financing (Part One)
- 原文链接: https://www.wheresyoured.at/premium-the-haters-guide-to-circular-financing-part-one/
- 作者: Ed Zitron
- 日期: 2026-08-28
- 分类: industry
- 来源类型: article
- 标签: nvidia, circular-financing, ai-economics, hyperscalers, neocloud
- 质量评分: 3/5
- 抓取时间: 2026-08-30T23:41:49+08:00
中文导读
Ed Zitron 循环融资系列第一部（付费长文，公开部分给出论点骨架与关键数字）：NVIDIA 超过 90% 营收来自数据中心硬件，其中 50-60% 卖给超大规模云厂商；其余主要靠 neocloud 与主权 AI 客户——靠举债买 GPU 再租给理论上存在的 AI 客户的公司。作者引 BofA 分析师称 neocloud/sovereign/on-premise 销售额已与超大规模云相当，但找不到与之匹配的真实主权需求证据（唯一点名是 SoftBank 在法国的 750 亿欧元投资计划）。叠加刚宣布的 17% 涨价、对 CoreWeave/OpenAI/Poolside/Perplexity 的投资-采购闭环，核心论点是 NVIDIA 最大客户在很大程度上由 NVIDIA 自己注资。第二部将覆盖循环融资的历史先例。判断 AI 资本开支可持续性的一手材料。
原文（抓取存档 · AK-RSS source archive (crawled 2026-08-30)）
# Premium: The Hater's Guide To Circular Financing (Part One)
> 发布时间: 2026-08-28T15:55:36.000Z
> 原文链接: https://www.wheresyoured.at/premium-the-haters-guide-to-circular-financing-part-one/
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_\[NVIDIA Company Meeting, the present day, YMCA playing\]_
**JENSEN HUANG_:_** We _love_ NVIDIA, don’t we folks? We’re the biggest, most-beautiful semiconductor company, we make the biggest, hottest GPUs for [_Clammy Sammy_](https://www.wheresyoured.at/hatersguide-openai/) and [_Wario Amodei_’s](https://www.wheresyoured.at/premium-the-haters-guide-to-anthropic/) huge, beautiful AI labs, _but they can’t afford them because they’re losing so much money!_ \[crowd booing\]
_It’s okay! It’s okay!_ Big strong men, the biggest muscles, big, beautiful, strong men like Satya Nadella are calling me, _begging_ — they’re begging, can you believe it? — they’re begging me, “Sir, Sir, please ship me [Vera Rubin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubin_\(microarchitecture\)?ref=wheresyoured.at) sir! I can’t get enough!” \[crowd braying\] they can’t get enough of Vera Rubin! They’re begging me to get Vera over there! Vera! Where’s Vera! \[scanning crowd\] get her up here! No, no, don’t do it, she’s too shy!
We love Grace too, _\[voice turning gravely\]_ [_Grace Blackwell_](https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/gb200-nvl72/?ref=wheresyoured.at), what a gal! I told them all [we’re going to ship a _trillion_ dollars of _Grace Blackwell_ and _Vera Rubin_ by the end of 2027](https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/nvidias-ceo-projects-1-trillion-in-ai-chip-sales-as-new-computing-era-begins-671b369d?ref=wheresyoured.at), our beautiful girls _Grace_ and _Vera_, they’re our biggest and most-expensive girls yet, our _Gee-Pee-Yous_, the media says “we don’t believe you sir!” but _I’m gonna make everyone buy ‘em, hell I’m gonna give ‘em the money to do it_ [_like I did with CoreWeave_](https://www.wheresyoured.at/dont-look-up/#:~:text=good%20friend%20and-,collaborator,-%2C%20would%20sign) _and then I’m gonna tell Clammy Sammy and say “Samuel,_ [_give ‘em a few billion like you gave to Michael Intrator_](https://www.coreweave.com/news/coreweave-expands-agreement-with-openai-by-up-to-6-5b?ref=wheresyoured.at)_,” and he’ll say “yes sir!”_
Now, people are saying to me — “Sir! Sir! Your customers can’t afford your semiconductors! Sir, they’re too expensive!” and I say _they’re not expensive enough!_ [_We’re gonna charge ‘em 17% more!_](https://www.theinformation.com/articles/nvidia-ai-chip-prices-rise-17-server-makers-tell-customers?rc=kz8jh3&ref=wheresyoured.at) _\[crowd braying\] Should we up the price? Should we do it? We’re gonna do it!_
In my mind, this is how Jensen Huang speaks to his workers, [more than 70% of whom are millionaires](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-producing-unprecedented-wealth-employees-003124691.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAMciMInrSIxqCPfP2uO-nxfeYtkCrgVlisZDOe7bsA4YKHxrHdWt33COcj8PjaeChlOL01B6JDzPz3Vf1PlZPFdSJSlMmsOphxsSGCDI1LnwGTMnYFQxajAnbp1GSYQ3PwQfUrWz62Ax5UrBJnisH2fiB5tiEy25XR00AXIwaIgd&ref=wheresyoured.at) as a result of NVIDIA’s remarkable stock growth, and from what I’m told by insiders, there’s a near-manic attention paid to stock movements as a result. I imagine working there must feel a little insane.
Assuming you arrived before the stock went parabolic in 2024, you’ve seen your RSUs explode 10x in the space of a few years, all based on the back of everybody talking about how _big_ and _huge_ AI is…
…_all as it becomes blatantly obvious that NVIDIA’s biggest customers are, for the most part, funded by NVIDIA_.
While NVIDIA still ostensibly sells things other than AI GPUs (like [autonomous cars](https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/solutions/autonomous-vehicles/?ref=wheresyoured.at), laptop graphics cards, and [simulation technology for robotics](https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/omniverse/?ref=wheresyoured.at)), more than 90% of its revenue comes from data center hardware. As a result, the company has become almost-entirely valued on whether or not it can continually come up with rationalizations for its largest customers to spunk tens of billions of dollars a quarter.
Why else would NVIDIA invest even an iota of effort into making [an NVIDIA-branded Openclaw](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/10/nvidia-open-source-ai-agent-platform-nemoclaw-wired-agentic-tools-openclaw-clawdbot-moltbot.html?ref=wheresyoured.at) or [build a platform for LLMs to do “agentic” things](https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/ai-agents?ref=wheresyoured.at), or [give $6 billion to Poolside (while investing another $1 billion)](https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/nvidia-is-spending-6-billion-to-build-a-powerful-u-s-alternative-to-chinese-ai-c51c38cc?ref=wheresyoured.at) and hire away most of its staff? Why else would it plan to [invest billions of dollars in Perplexity at a $30 billion valuation](https://www.theinformation.com/articles/nvidia-discusses-perplexity-investment-30-billion-plus-valuation-considered-tech-licensing-deal?rc=kz8jh3&ref=wheresyoured.at) that lands somewhere between “fucking stupid” and “laughable”?
Sorry, I’m being a little vague. Everything NVIDIA has done for the last three years has existed to do two things:
- Create sales for its AI GPUs and associated hardware.
- Create demand for AI compute for its customers.
NVIDIA has succeeded in doing the first primarily by selling these GPUs to hyperscalers like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, and Meta, who make up somewhere between 50% and 60% of its GPU sales depending on which analyst you ask.
The rest comes from a mixture of unnamed “sovereign AI customers” and “neoclouds” — companies that exist to raise debt, buy NVIDIA GPUs, and put them in data centers to rent to theoretical AI customers. Per Vivek Arya of Bank of America (at the BoFA Global Technology Conference in June), sales to “neocloud/sovereign/on-premise” were about the same as those to hyperscalers, and while it’s tempting to dither here and say “there could be large sovereign buildouts!” I can’t find compelling evidence that these actually exist [outside of a theoretical 75 billion Euro investment in AI infrastructure in France by SoftBank](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/31/softbank-to-build-up-ai-data-centers-in-france-with-major-investment.html?ref=wheresyoured.at), which doesn’t have that much money to spend.
In any case, NVIDIA’s entire strategy has become a case of either convincing the largest companies in the world to give Jensen Huang $100 billion a year or artificially inflating its revenues through circular financing, which is obviously what I’m talking about today.
This is the first part of my Hater’s Guide To Circular Financing, a comprehensive analysis of the current state of NVIDIA’s massive circular financing operation, why it has yet to break, its limitations, and the material concerns that were raised in its latest quarterly earnings.
The second part, coming next week, will cover the history of circular financing, where we’ve seen it before, and what we can learn from its horrible past.
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