Nvidia has a new way to sell more AI chips: help customers buy them
GMI Cloud founder and CEO Alex Yeh. GMI Cloud Nvidia is backstopping loans for neoclouds to fund massive AI buildouts. GMI Cloud has committed $500 million in capital expenditures under the new model. Nvidia's partnership strategy has previously sparked debate about "circular financing." Earlier this year, the AI startup Fireworks AI wanted to rent hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of AI compute. Rather than buying massive clusters of Nvidia's AI chips, known as GPUs, or renting from cloud giants like Amazon or Microsoft, some startups like Fireworks turn to specialized AI cloud providers — called neoclouds — for faster access to GPUs, more competitive pricing, and infrastructure specifically tailored to AI. Fireworks chose the neocloud GMI Cloud. There was a catch: To serve Fireworks, GMI first needed to buy the Nvidia GPU systems from a hardware manufacturer — and banks wouldn't provide the financing because Fireworks wasn't an investment-grade c...
