The financing scheme Nvidia used to keep small AI clouds buying its chips has been switched off, seven weeks after it started
In July, Nvidia offered smaller cloud providers a deal that made their bank loans work: if a provider could not find a customer for the GPUs it bought, Nvidia would rent that capacity itself, guaranteeing a floor of revenue — and in exchange Nvidia took half of everything the provider earned above a base hourly rate. The Wall Street Journal reported on 27 August that the programme has been shelved, less than two months after it was announced. According to the report, Nvidia's own staff had warned customers and prospects that the arrangement could attract antitrust scrutiny, and some would-be partners had balked at how much control Nvidia asked for. A company spokesperson says the July business model 'is still in place and continues to evolve due to high demand', and Nvidia has left open the option of restructuring the idea or folding it into something else later.
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