The Nvidia backstop book now belongs to Colette Kress, and by one account she never wanted one of its biggest lines. The interim chief inherits at least $286 billion of named commitments to c
The Nvidia backstop book now belongs to Colette Kress, and by one account she never wanted one of its biggest lines. The interim chief inherits at least $286 billion of named commitments to customers, landlords and lenders, on this desk’s sum of four figures reported by CNBC: $36 billion of cloud purchases promised to neoclouds, $20 billion of data-centre leases, a $105 billion guarantee for OpenAI’s Ohio campus and up to $125 billion behind a Wall Street credit programme. The Information reported that Kress opposed the OpenAI deal, according to CNBC.
Thursday’s tape shows which half of that book investors fear. Neoclouds, the borrowers those promises support, fell hard: CoreWeave 7%, IREN 8% and Nebius 17% at 1:58 p.m. Eastern, the last after weak guidance of its own. Chip and optical suppliers in which Nvidia holds equity barely moved, with Intel down 1%, Marvell 2% and Lumentum 3%. The market is marking the credit line, not the equity stakes.
Nvidia disclosed in July that it had committed to buy up to $36 billion of cloud services from neoclouds, the data-centre operators that fill their halls with its chips, CNBC reported. The Ohio guarantee is phased and conditional, and we covered its cut from a discussed $250 billion in August. Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, a finance professor at Columbia Business School, estimates total obligations at about $400 billion, roughly a tenth of Nvidia’s $3.97 trillion market value. Semafor counts a further $51 billion of private-company stock and $63 billion of listed stakes.
The tightening began before Jensen Huang left. “There has to be some level of offtake commitment, whether it’s a binding LOI or ideally an executed offtake contract,” Adil Malik, a partner at advisory firm Origin Partners, told CNBC of the standard Nvidia now applies before it backstops a client. A non-binding letter of intent used to be enough, he said, until about three months ago.
Not systemic, on the evidence so far. “The company would have to get to the brink of extinction before all these guarantees come into jeopardy,” Van Nieuwerburgh told CNBC. Sheila Bair, the former head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., said Nvidia is not “too big to fail in a bank sense at all”. The stress shows up at the borrowers instead. The cost of insuring CoreWeave’s debt rose 94% between 1 October and 5 November before settling, CNBC said, citing LSEG data.
For credit desks and prime brokers that finance neocloud paper, the question is no longer whether Nvidia can pay. It is whether Nvidia renews. Three dates test that. The quarterly filing that follows Tuesday’s results will update the $36 billion and $20 billion lines. On 19 November Anthropic is due to start trading, and Nvidia has agreed to buy $10 billion of its stock straight after the offering, CNBC reported; see our Anthropic IPO preview. The third is the first neocloud financing that closes without Nvidia’s signature.
Expect continuity on what is signed and caution on what is not. The board has said customer commitments will continue, and chair Harvey Jones called Kress “a key architect of NVIDIA’s growth and capital strategy” in a staff e-mail obtained by CNBC. But a chief executive who, by The Information’s account, argued against the OpenAI guarantee is unlikely to write a larger one while six investigations are open. That points to wider spreads for second-tier neoclouds first, with CoreWeave’s default swaps as the gauge. Related: CoreWeave’s results, the six investigations and retail’s record dip buying.
