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A comment on Nvidia Allegedly Engineered Scarcity by Funding AI Startups to Buy Its GPUs. Parent comment

Re:Nvidia Allegedly Engineered Scarcity by Funding AI Startu... by torginus on Saturday November 14, 2026 @06:29AM (#50496153)
Why CCP? That Nvidia has been irking Wall Street bankers by acting like a bank has been public knowledge for quite a while. What Nvidia did is instead of selling their GPUs for $10, they sold them for $100, with very favorable terms over a long time, creating lots of (cheap) debt for others, who were mainly datacenter companies, who could then pay off the loans and rent out the GPUs at razor thin margins.

This scheme had pissed off bankers that a company muscled in on their turf, created lots of debt in a time when US debt was already sky high and becoming unpopular, relied on GPU depreciation being low (implying tech progress was slow, which didn't gel with the singularity crowd), and getting crazy rich in the process.

I don't even know how China factors into this other than competing with the US

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Re:Nvidia Allegedly Engineered Scarcity by Funding AI Startu... by mr_toad on Saturday November 14, 2026 @07:56AM (#50496658)
> This scheme had pissed off bankers that a company muscled in on their turf

Weird if true, because businesses having a side-line in financing their customers is extremely common. Most large retailers, car dealers etc all do it. Sometimes they outsource to a third party, but sometimes they do it all in house. In a few cases they end up making more money as a finance company than the business they started in.

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Re:Nvidia Allegedly Engineered Scarcity by Funding AI Startu... by retwakm4 on Saturday November 14, 2026 @08:06AM (#50496722)
Yeah, but at this scale, it's mostly banks and private equity and other finance companies, right? Like, funding enormous data centers type debt?

I've seen it be done with consumers and small B2B but not big giant business finance like this before.

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Re:Nvidia Allegedly Engineered Scarcity by Funding AI Startu... by Geezus_42 on Saturday November 14, 2026 @08:19AM (#50496800)
I remember hearing about a large US company that had a financing arm that was way bigger than the primary business they were known for.
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Re:Nvidia Allegedly Engineered Scarcity by Funding AI Startu... by Merrill on Saturday November 14, 2026 @08:46AM (#50497000)
GE Capital during the 2008 financial crisis?
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Re:Nvidia Allegedly Engineered Scarcity by Funding AI Startu... by Geezus_42 on Saturday November 14, 2026 @09:27AM (#50497272)
That's the one I was think of.
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Re:Nvidia Allegedly Engineered Scarcity by Funding AI Startu... by Nursie on Saturday November 14, 2026 @08:52AM (#50497042)
Might have been IBM at some points in the past, unsure these days.
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