Nvidia is writing large checks to its suppliers even as it amps up financial backstops for less-creditworthy customers. The strategy might help the company skirt supply constraints and realize lofty revenue growth forecasts, but it isn't risk-free.
Nvidia said Wednesday that its commitments to suppliers to secure components for its AI chips and systems reached $279 billion in its latest quarter, more than doubling from $119 billion the previous quarter.
Securing those components and avoiding supply constraints is the only thing preventing the company from growing faster, executives said after reporting quarterly sales and profits Wednesday that topped analysts' forecasts.
Nvidia gave a stronger-than-expected sales outlook for its current quarter and forecast 70% revenue growth for its next fiscal year, which ends in January 2028.
"Even though our demand is much greater than 70%, our supply allows us to confidently deliver 70%, and we're going to continue to work with our supply chain to increase on that," Chief Executive Jensen Huang said on a call with analysts.
The surge in supply commitments primarily relates to memory, Nvidia Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said in prepared remarks Wednesday. Large amounts of high-bandwidth memory are crucial for Nvidia's advanced AI chips, and supplies have been extremely tight in the past year.
The purchase commitments should help Nvidia corner a larger portion of the memory supply, even if higher prices weigh on its profit margins. The company expects gross margins to fall from a projected 74% in its current quarter to about 71.5% in the following quarter because of memory prices.
"We have a really gigantic supply chain, and so we have incredible partners and we've secured a lot of supply," Huang said Wednesday. "But we just need a lot more."
While commitments can grease the wheels of a supply chain during a boom, they also serve as insurance for suppliers against an unexpected downturn in end demand. In such a scenario they can transform from being a strategic advantage for the company in the middle-in this case, Nvidia-into a painful liability.
That is precisely the situation that befell Cisco Systems in 2001. When the dot-com bubble burst, demand for Cisco's networking gear plummeted, but it was still on the hook for commitments to its own suppliers. It was able to negotiate away some of them, but took a $2.2 billion inventory charge in a single quarter.
Viewed through that lens, Nvidia's purchase commitments add to a growing list of financial risks the company is taking. It believes they are essential to support booming demand for its products, but they could also amplify the pain of a downturn.
Among them, Nvidia is providing a $105 billion backstop on an OpenAI data center lease and up to $125 billion of residual-value support as part of a $500 billion financing deal with Wall Street asset managers. It is also guaranteeing $36 billion in sales for cloud-computing companies it sells chips to, in exchange for revenue-sharing deals.
On top of these, Nvidia disclosed Wednesday that it has entered into data center lease agreements worth $20 billion that it expects to transfer to third parties. And it is providing "selective credit enhancement" for nearly two gigawatts of computing power to a "frontier AI lab" that isn't OpenAI, Kress said. She didn't quantify its value.
Frontier labs, Kress said, "are growing faster than what their balance sheets and credit profiles can support."
It isn't too hard to imagine a scenario where a bust squeezes Nvidia from multiple sides. Suppliers might pressure the company to pay up at the same time as financial commitments to suddenly less-eager customers come due. Declines in the value of Nvidia's equity investments, many of which are in its own customers, would only deepen the profit impact.
No such scenario is likely any time soon, of course. Demand signals for Nvidia lately have been strong, including robust AI spending forecasts from big tech companies. Investors were cheered by Nvidia's forecast of 70% higher revenue in its next fiscal year, sending its stock up in after-hours trading Wednesday.
Still, jitters have been growing about Nvidia's risk-taking. Big-tech AI spenders are already projected to slow growth in outlays in the coming years. This helps explain why the company's price-to-forward-earnings ratio has been hovering near a decade-long low recently.
Nvidia's financing and supply-chain moves might help it grow faster now, but magnify its risk longer term. The stock, already a concentrated bet on AI, is only getting more so.
Comments