In accounting terms, this is a shady business practice known as "round tripping" where you invest in a company for the sole purpose of them buying your product. It allows you to count your revenue multiple times.
Nvidia has consistently done this with Coreweave, Nscale, really most of its balance sheet investments are like this. On the one hand there's a vaguely cogent rationale that they're a strategic investor and it sort of makes sense as an hardware-for-equity swap; on the other, it's obviously goosing revenue numbers. This is a bigger issue when it's $100B than with previous investments.
It's a good time to gently remind everyone that there are a whole pile of legal things one can do to change how a security looks "by the numbers" and this isn't even close to the shadiest. Heck some sell-side research makes what companies themselves do look benign.
Two economists are walking in a forest when they come across a pile of shit.
The first economist says to the other “I’ll pay you $100 to eat that pile of shit.” The second economist takes the $100 and eats the pile of shit.
They continue walking until they come across a second pile of shit. The second economist turns to the first and says “I’ll pay you $100 to eat that pile of shit.” The first economist takes the $100 and eats a pile of shit.
Walking a little more, the first economist looks at the second and says, "You know, I gave you $100 to eat shit, then you gave me back the same $100 to eat shit. I can't help but feel like we both just ate shit for nothing."
"That's not true", responded the second economist. "We increased total revenue by $200!"
This should go without saying but unfortunately it really doesn't these days:
This kind of corporate behavior is bad and will end up hurting somebody. If we're lucky the fallout will only hurt Nvidia. More likely it will end up hurting most taxpayers.
Its the same loop de loop NVIDIA is doing with Coreweave as i understand.'Investing' in coreweave which then 'buys' NVIDIA merch for cloud rental , resulting in Coreweave being the top 4 customers of NVIDIA chips.
Wait, why the quotes? NVDA sends cash, and the Coreweave spends it, no? I don’t think quotes are accurate, if they imply these transactions aren’t real, and material. At the end of the day, NVDA owns Coreweave stock, and actual, you know, physical hardware is put into data centers, and cash is wired.
Well we do have the precedent of HPE/Autonomy in the UK [1], which ruled that the process is essentially fraud. Whether there will be a prosecution in the current corporate environment remains to be seen. Essentially though the roundtrip revenue inflation was already ruled illegal.
I don't really understand how it is round tripping.
In the end, Nvidia will have OpenAI shares, which are valuable, and OpenAI will have GPUs, which are also valuable. It is not fake revenue, the GPUs will be made, sold at market price, and used, they are not intended to be bought back and sold to another customer. And hopefully, these GPUs will be put to good use by OpenAI so that they can make a profit, which will give Nvidia some return on investment.
It doesn't look so different from a car loan, where the dealer lends you the money so that you can buy their car.
A dollar is always a dollar, so it's hard to claim that $1 million in revenue is actually worth $10 million. OpenAI shares, on the other hand, aren't publicly traded, so it's much easier to claim they're worth $10 million when noone would actually be willing to buy for more than $1 million.
It's not necessarily manipulative but it's also not exactly an arms-length purchase of GPUs on the open market.
It looks like NVDIA looking to move up the value chain to have a stake in the even higher margin/addressable market instead of simply selling the tools.
what is OpenAI's durable, competitive advantage that differentiates it against the numerous other LLM providers? Investing at a $500bn valuation for a company that's losing money and has bad unit economics this seems rather aggressive.
Customer A pays you $100 for goods that cost you $10. You invest $100-$10=$90 in customer B so that they'll pay you $90 for goods that cost you $9. Your reported revenue is now $100+$90=$190, but the only money that entered the system is the original $100.
Yes, but you’ve also incurred a $90 expense in purchasing the stock of Company B and that stock is on the balance sheet.
In the actual shady version of this, Company B isn’t the hottest AI investment around, it’s a shell company created by your brother’s cousin that isn’t actually worth what you’re claiming on the balance sheet because it was only created for the round tripping shell game.
Except that this is isn't round-tripping at all. Round-tripping doesn't result in a company actually incurring expenses to create more product. Round-tripping is the term for schemes that enable you to double count assets/revenue without any economic effects taking place.
Every time HackerNews talks about anything in the legal or finance realm, people trip over themselves to make arguments for why something a big tech is doing is illegal. This is definitively neither illegal nor shady. If Nvidia believes, for example, that OpenAI can use their GPUs to turn a profit, then this is inherently positive sum economically for both sides: OpenAI gets capital in the form of GPUs, uses them to generate tokens which they sell above the cost of that capital and then the return some of the excess value to Nvidia. This is done via equity. It's a way for Nvidia to get access to some of the excess value of their product.
“ Every time HackerNews talks about anything in the legal or finance realm, people trip over themselves to make arguments for why something a big tech is doing is illegal.”
It's real revenue, but you are operating a fractional reserve revenue operation. If the person your investing in has trouble, or you have trouble - the whole thing falls over very fast.
"In accounting terms, this is a shady business practice known as "round tripping" where you invest in a company for the sole purpose of them buying your product. It allows you to count your revenue multiple times."
... and we've seen this before in previous bubbles ...
