This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on August 26th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.
Nvidia is not only innovative with its chips – the creativity now extends to the financial side as well. But acting as a bank for its customers, against collateral of uncertain value, carries an echo of the financial crisis.
If GB Glace had to lend children money so they could buy a Piggelin – wouldn’t that be something of a red flag?
Keep that analogy in mind when Nvidia reports its quarterly figures on Wednesday evening. Jensen Huang will talk about new chips and the enormous demand from customers. The company’s new financing arrangement will hardly be at the center of things.
But there is something odd here that sets off alarm bells.
If Silicon Valley has a history of being inventive with technology, New York has a matching reputation when it comes to finance. It is innovation of a different kind, but behind the scenes it underpins a great many corporate deals.
The chip maker Nvidia is now testing a blend of those two worlds. Innovative technical products with innovative funding. Together with some of the largest players in finance, it is offering its customers loans so they can invest more in chips and data centers.
Founder Jensen Huang has assembled a group featuring the biggest names in the industry – among them Apollo, Blackstone, BlackRock and Goldman Sachs.
Between them they have taken on one of the obstacles to the ongoing AI expansion: how customers are going to afford to keep it going. Together they have scraped together $500 billion to lend to new and existing buyers.
Costs are precisely what has been in focus for Nvidia lately. Sharp price increases on computer memory have made the servers used for AI computation more expensive. That is not Nvidia’s fault – but it becomes their problem. Both memory and their GPU chips are needed for the systems to work. That pushes up the total bill for anyone wanting to build a data center.
Nvidia could lower its own prices to compensate for the increase. But it obviously has no wish to. This is where the financing arrangement comes in. By offering cheaper credit, the total cost for customers comes down.
Everyone happy?
Unfortunately it is not quite that simple. Underpinning this arrangement is an unusual form of collateral.
When you borrow to buy a property, the building itself serves as security. If you cannot pay, the lender simply comes and takes it.
Data centers do include buildings, of course, but those are the cheap part in this category. What sits inside is what costs money.
So Nvidia and its financial partners are taking access to the chips as security for their loans. They regard computing power as an asset that can be borrowed against – an “investable infrastructure asset”, as Huang calls it. But is it really?
The assumption being made is that this computing power, like a property, has a more or less constant value. There will always be someone who wants it. Hopefully at roughly the same price. But given how AI has developed over the past few months, that is far from obvious.
The main threat comes from the east, where the Chinese AI models keep getting better. And more importantly – they are dramatically cheaper to use. Being open source means access is free and can spread rapidly among developers.
Large companies such as Thomson Reuters have built AI products based on a variant of Alibaba’s model Qwen, and Cursor – the coding tool SpaceX acquired – uses the Chinese model Kimi. The list goes on. Nvidia itself is now spending $6 billion to build a model of its own that can compete with these new Chinese players.
If AI development continues in this direction, it is possible that the amount of computing power in demand falls – or at least does not grow at the astronomical rate much of the industry expects. That in turn would leave the loans Nvidia and its partners are writing resting on shakier security.
Issuing large loans where the underlying collateral is weak is a story we have heard before. The great financial crisis of 2008 was built on exactly this. There it was home loans that could not be repaid, despite sounding like the most stable thing in the world. They were not. Least of all after financial innovation took off and created a mass of new assets with that decidedly unstable one at the bottom.
What Nvidia and its partners are doing is not exactly the same thing. But it sounds uncomfortably familiar.
