Nvidia is going to start taking a cut of cloud vendors' money.

Nvidia is leveraging its powerful balance sheet as a market tool, providing financial backing to emerging cloud service providers in exchange for revenue sharing — quietly evolving from a chip seller into the "central bank" of the AI computing ecosystem.

On July 1, according to tech media outlet The Information, Nvidia is offering financial guarantees to young cloud service providers that rent or sell its GPUs — if these companies cannot find enough AI developers to lease computing power, Nvidia will repurchase their unsold GPU capacity at an agreed price.

In exchange, Nvidia will take a percentage cut from these cloud service providers' revenue, with the share gradually decreasing over the contract term. GPU cloud service providers Firmus and Sharon AI have already joined the program, and three other executives who do business with Nvidia confirmed the arrangements.

On July 1, Nvidia announced on its official website the launch of a new business model combining revenue sharing with credit support, allowing AI cloud providers to purchase Nvidia infrastructure without fully bearing upfront capital expenditures, and to offer computing services to downstream AI-native companies, model developers, and enterprise clients.

According to reports, this program is internally referred to by some at Nvidia as the "AI Compute Partnership." An Nvidia spokesperson also confirmed the program's existence. This move marks a significant strategic shift for Nvidia:

On one hand, it lowers the financing barrier for emerging cloud service providers to expand its customer base; on the other, it directly participates in profit distribution in the downstream computing market through revenue sharing, extending its control over the AI industry chain further downstream.

Model Shift: From Selling Chips to Sharing Cloud Revenue

According to Nvidia's official press release, Nvidia will earn additional cloud service revenue beyond standard product revenue, creating a recurring revenue stream tied to usage. The core intent of this model is to break down the financing barriers that have long constrained startups from accessing large-scale computing power.

Nvidia positions this framework as the "DSX AI Factory" model, targeting AI service scenarios that require continuous operation across regions, high utilization, and multi-tenant accelerated computing.

Sharon AI and Firmus are the first cloud providers to adopt this model. Sharon AI plans to deploy up to 40k Nvidia Grace Blackwell GB300 GPUs; Firmus is building a DSX AI Factory campus on Batam Island, Indonesia, with an expected scale of 360 megawatts and up to 170k Nvidia GPUs. These two deployments directly reflect Nvidia's latest progress in converting computing demand into financeable, deployable infrastructure.

Nvidia points out that emerging AI companies have historically faced severe restrictions in obtaining capital-intensive infrastructure — even signing long-term commitment contracts often fails to secure financing for computing purchases. This means that many AI-native companies, model developers, and inference service providers face long waits when scaling computing capacity: site selection, power procurement, construction, hardware commissioning — each step can take months or even longer.

The promise of the new model: By realigning the economic structure, these groups can access full-stack accelerated computing capacity more quickly, without waiting for the traditional infrastructure construction cycle to complete.

Underwriting Logic: Solving the Core Problem of GPU Financing

According to reports, GPUs are typically the most expensive component in AI data centers. For chip buyers with lower credit ratings, securing sufficient loans is itself a challenge.

A data center executive commented on this, saying Nvidia's deals "kill two birds with one stone." He explained that if Nvidia only underwrites leases for data center facilities, "you still face the problem of 'how to finance the GPU'"; but if Nvidia commits to paying for unsold computing power in the facility, "the GPU financing problem is solved, and the data center financing problem is also solved."

In other words, Nvidia's underwriting commitment effectively acts as a credit enhancement tool, enabling emerging cloud service providers that previously struggled to obtain bank loans to leverage larger capital and accelerate data center construction.

Strategic Intent: Breaking the Monopoly of Large Customers

Nvidia's rollout of these measures has a clear strategic backdrop. Currently, a few major cloud service providers like Amazon, Microsoft, SpaceX, Oracle, Meta, and Google purchase the majority of Nvidia's chip production. However, several of these companies are developing competing AI chips in-house, posing a potential threat to Nvidia.

To reduce its reliance on these giant customers, Nvidia has been supporting a group of emerging GPU cloud service providers like CoreWeave over the past few years. This "AI Compute Partnership" is a continuation and deepening of that strategy.

According to previous reports from The Information, Nvidia has also recently been negotiating to provide financial guarantees for OpenAI's lease of a large data center in Ohio. If fully built at current chip, labor, power, and other material prices, the facility could cost up to $500 billion.

Capital Investment: From Equity Investments to Capacity Guarantees

Nvidia's capital deployment in this direction has been substantial.

To date, Nvidia has invested billions of dollars in several emerging cloud service providers in exchange for equity, and in some cases agreed to repurchase chips from these companies, including CoreWeave and Lambda, with total transactions worth billions of dollars. According to previous reports from The Information, Nvidia's own researchers also used GPU servers repurchased from Lambda.

In terms of capacity guarantees, Nvidia began advancing such deals last fall. In September 2024, Nvidia committed to buying all of CoreWeave's unsold capacity through 2032 if CoreWeave could not find tenants, at the time worth $6.3 billion. This effectively alleviated investor concerns about CoreWeave's high-leverage business model, pushing its stock up nearly 30% in the following week.

According to a regulatory filing Nvidia submitted in May (covering the quarter through April), Nvidia subsequently added another $3.5 billion to guarantee customer data center leases in exchange for the right to purchase their stock.

Overall, Nvidia is building a multi-layered interest-binding mechanism: equity investments, capacity repurchases, lease guarantees, and now revenue sharing. Each layer deepens Nvidia's financial ties with downstream cloud service providers, allowing Nvidia to directly share in the incremental revenue from AI computing commercialization beyond chip sales.

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