Instead of just selling chips, Nvidia is offering AI clouds a revenue-sharing and credit-support model built to get GPUs into the hands of companies that could not otherwise afford them.
Nvidia is changing how it gets paid. The company announced on Wednesday a new arrangement in which AI cloud providers can access large volumes of its chips in exchange for a share of the revenue those chips eventually generate, rather than paying the full cost upfront.
The logic, as Nvidia frames it, is a capital problem. Emerging AI companies have historically had limited access to the capital-intensive infrastructure needed to train and run large models, and even long-term customer commitments have often not been enough to unlock financing for compute.
Nvidia’s answer is to let AI clouds buy its hardware and resell Nvidia-powered cloud capacity, with Nvidia collecting standard product revenue on the chips and then a further cut of whatever the cloud earns from renting them out.
The 💜 of EU techThe latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!It is the same compute crunch that has sent valuations soaring for GPU resellers like Runpod, which hit a $1 billion valuation this June renting out chips it does not own.
