Re:Nvidia Allegedly Engineered Scarcity by Funding AI Startu...
by dofm on Saturday November 14, 2026 @12:04AM
(#50494150)
I don’t know, because I am in the UK and I don’t know exactly what definition of vendor finance you’re working with.
For example, here in the UK, that is extremely regulated, and you’re usually not buying with the dealer’s money, or the dealer chain’s money. Sometimes you are buying with the manufacturer’s money (through a regulated subsidiary finance company or joint venture) but most of the time you’re simply buying from a regulated finance company, from which the dealer is getting an introducer’s fee (and for which they must agree to be regulated).
(I am not a driver and have no car loans but I am reasonably familiar with the business model from previous client business)
It is my understanding that Nvidia is pretty directly using their own money for this: there is a criticism that they are essentially “selling their balance sheet as a service”, and that their total exposure is about $200 billion.
Nvidia’s loans are not, in that sense, particularly comparable to even the loosest definition of auto loans.
This is all putting aside how much money Jensen Huang has persuaded others to loan. Perhaps that side of things won’t go away; I think we might see him carrying on that function in some future capacity. But it will almost inevitably be at a much smaller scale, because the market is significantly less enthusiastic about lending more money.
For example, here in the UK, that is extremely regulated, and you’re usually not buying with the dealer’s money, or the dealer chain’s money. Sometimes you are buying with the manufacturer’s money (through a regulated subsidiary finance company or joint venture) but most of the time you’re simply buying from a regulated finance company, from which the dealer is getting an introducer’s fee (and for which they must agree to be regulated).
(I am not a driver and have no car loans but I am reasonably familiar with the business model from previous client business)
It is my understanding that Nvidia is pretty directly using their own money for this: there is a criticism that they are essentially “selling their balance sheet as a service”, and that their total exposure is about $200 billion.
Nvidia’s loans are not, in that sense, particularly comparable to even the loosest definition of auto loans.
This is all putting aside how much money Jensen Huang has persuaded others to loan. Perhaps that side of things won’t go away; I think we might see him carrying on that function in some future capacity. But it will almost inevitably be at a much smaller scale, because the market is significantly less enthusiastic about lending more money.