Nvidia pauses revenue-sharing deals with AI cloud firms
Nvidia's plan to become more than the chip supplier to the AI boom — to finance the data centers themselves and share in their revenue — just hit a speed bump.
Nvidia has paused the revenue-sharing and credit-support deals it struck with AI cloud companies, people familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal, with Reuters confirming the move.
The program, first announced in July, was Nvidia's bid to co-build "AI factories" with cloud providers — supplying Blackwell GPUs while taking a share of revenue once the infrastructure went live. According to the report, the pause came after internal discussions about whether the arrangements reached too deeply into customers' financing and business decisions, a position that could draw antitrust scrutiny. The program was halted last week and has not been formally cancelled, the people said, leaving the door open for it to resume.
The pullback matters because of the scale it had reached. Two flagship partners show what Nvidia was underwriting: Sharon AI, which planned to deploy roughly 40,000 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs for sovereign AI infrastructure, and Firmus, which planned up to 170,000 GPUs at an AI-factory campus on Indonesia's Batam Island. Nvidia's latest earnings filing puts a number on the broader exposure — roughly $108 billion in guarantees and other commitments backing AI cloud and data-center buildouts, spanning financial guarantees, credit support, financing arrangements, and data-center leases.
There's a quieter risk buried in the fine print, too. Some of those agreements could require Nvidia to buy back unsold committed compute capacity, and the company has warned that its share of revenue could shrink if AI compute demand or prices come in below expectations. The antitrust pause, in other words, sits on top of a financing structure that already carried real market risk — and shares slipped after hours on the news.
What to watch: whether Nvidia quietly restructures the deals rather than abandoning them, and whether US or European regulators take an interest in the program regardless.
Is Nvidia's retreat from AI-factory financing a sign it's grown too big to move aggressively — or just prudent housekeeping? Tell us in the comments.
