Nvidia has halted some of the transactions under the financing programme it introduced eight weeks ago, in which it extends credit to AI cloud companies buying its chips and takes a cut of what those chips later earn, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.
The scheme was announced on 1 July, and it does an unusual amount of work for one arrangement. Nvidia sells the chips, guarantees to rent back capacity that a customer cannot resell, and then collects a share of the cloud revenue those chips generate, meaning the company is paid at the point of sale and again along the way.
Two objections surfaced internally, according to The Wall Street Journal. Employees flagged that the structure could attract antitrust scrutiny, and they raised the related question of how far Nvidia could reasonably go in dictating how its customers run their businesses.
That second concern was not hypothetical. The company had been restricting which parties could lease the chips in question, and it preferred that capacity be spread across several smaller AI firms rather than concentrated with a single large customer, conditions that some partners found more constraining than they had expected.
Nvidia did not confirm the pause but did not dispute the programme’s existence either. “The new business model we introduced in July that opens up compute access to the fast-growing AI ecosystem is still in place and continues to evolve due to high demand,” a spokesperson said, per the Wall Street Journal.
