Nvidia is increasingly acting like a central bank for AI startups, actively shaping the compute market. The chip giant is offering young cloud providers sweeping financial guarantees so they can afford expensive AI chips. In return, Nvidia gets a direct cut of their cloud revenue. Specifically, the company promises to lease back unused GPUs itself if the providers can't find AI developers as customers.

"Nvidia kills two birds with one stone," a data center executive told The Information. If Nvidia only guaranteed the building leases, "then you're still stuck with, 'How do you finance the GPUs?'" But when Nvidia guarantees it will pay for unused compute capacity, "the GPUs get financed and the data center gets financed."

This approach helps Nvidia reduce its heavy dependence on tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, which still buy the majority of its chips while building their own AI hardware.