Nvidia Stock Rises 3% as CEO Eases AI Debt Fears

Dow Jones08-12 22:58

Nvidia stock was rising in premarket trading Wednesday as fears over the company's exposure to debt fueling the artificial intelligence boom eased. CEO Jensen Huang looks like a market whisperer once again.

The shares rose 2.96% to $223.94. One factor depressing Nvidia stock in recent days has been nagging fears over the sustainability of debt to fund the buildout in AI.

Hyperscalers such as Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft -- which provide the massive cloud computing and data infrastructure behind AI -- have been taking on massive debt to fund the AI buildout. As a result, the cost to insure their debt against default, via credit default swaps, or CDS, has risen in recent months, rattling bond-watchers on Wall Street.

The worry is that if the AI boom doesn't deliver as much as hoped, bondholders will be left holding the bag.

Nvidia hasn't been spared those concerns, because it is guaranteeing financing to companies that buy its AI chips -- such as the report in July that it was negotiating up to $250 billion in financing for OpenAI. Nvidia's own CDS have risen to the highest level this year in recent weeks.

News on Monday that might have provided clarity only muddied the waters. Nvidia announced it was partnering with financial giants Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR to establish AI infrastructure financing platforms to mobilize more than $500 billion. That raised the question if so-called "circular financing" would spiral.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang looked to quash those concerns on Tuesday, directly addressing circular financing. In a social media post on X, Huang said Nvidia may provide "a residual-value support mechanism for up to 25% of an opportunity, assessed carefully on a project-by-project basis."

This suggests Nvidia's financing exposure, left open-ended in the initial release about $500 billion, may be more limited.

That should ease fears for Nvidia's bondholders. It could provide some buoyancy to the stock price, too.

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Comments

  • Rainy777
    01:09
    Rainy777
    The only thing Nvidia announced was that large investment firms would like to invest other people's money in data centres and Nvidia would like a piece if it. But that's hardly news. Nothing else is concrete, same as the $100m investment in OpenAI from last year that never happened. 
  • a4xrbj1
    08-12 23:05
    a4xrbj1
    It just means the fall will be even steeper once the bubble bursts. All these investments in AI infrastructure and the companies around it cannot mask that AI so far hasn't even be remotely close to any profit making. There's no business case and with almost every week another cheap Chinese open source model getting up to par with the 20-100x more expansive US Frontier models it's also a war of attrition played by China that OpenAI and even Anthropic will loose!
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