Smart move from NVIDIA, they rolled out a program where AI startups swap high-performance compute for a share of future product and cloud earnings.

So NVIDIA gets paid twice: first when the infrastructure is purchased, then again through a recurring share of the cloud revenue generated by that supported capacity.

NVIDIA is not mainly targeting AWS or Google Cloud here; it is backing specialized GPU cloud providers, i.e. neoclouds.

The aim is to use the new revenue-sharing model to reach researchers and nascent companies that lack the money for large-scale AI resources.

So the neocloud buys NVIDIA infrastructure with help from NVIDIA’s credit-support and revenue-sharing structure, then rents that GPU capacity to AI companies that need training, fine-tuning, and high-volume inference.

NVIDIA gets the hardware sale upfront, but it also keeps earning a recurring share of the cloud revenue produced by those GPUs, which turns the chip from a one-time product into a long-term revenue meter.

So, NVIDIA turns a rack of GPUs from a one-time hardware sale into an income-producing asset, while the neocloud gets easier financing and the startup gets faster compute without building a data center.

Nvidia has already committed more than $40 billion to AI investments in early 2026, led by a $30 billion stake in OpenAI, alongside multi-billion-dollar investments in Corning Inc. and IREN Ltd..