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A financing arrangement where vendors or investors and the funded firm buy from each other, inflating revenue and amplifying bub
A Wall Street Journal profile of Nvidia interim CEO Colette Kress claims the company pushed additional deals in mid-to-late 2026 to absorb excess TSMC wafer supply and keep GPU prices elevated. The report ties long-standing circular financing accusations to governance changes following Jensen Huang's resignation, raising questions about pricing power across the AI compute supply chain.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Nvidia invested in AI startups that then purchased its GPUs and built data centers, allegedly to sustain the perception of high demand and absorb excess semiconductor supply from TSMC. The report also notes that CFO and acting CEO Colette Kress pushed to scale back such circular financing arrangements after Jensen Huang's resignation. If substantiated, the allegation would directly undermine market assumptions about genuine AI compute demand.
The Fed's financial stability report shows 87% of polled market professionals now name AI as the top financial risk, up from 50% in spring. AI infrastructure debt surpassed $680B by October, roughly 5x all of 2023 and about 31% of investment-grade corporate borrowing, while big tech and chipmakers carry over $3T in future leases and guarantees that may understate true AI exposure. GPU makers guarantee chip values and invest in the same buyers, creating circular financing, and the largest US banks hold close to $1T of exposure to big tech and data center builders.
According to The Wall Street Journal, former Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang admitted in August 2026 that major cloud providers are shifting to in-house chips, leaving Nvidia with a massive oversupply of prepaid TSMC wafers and memory arriving like an "avalanche." Huang clashed with then-CFO and now interim CEO Colette Kress over the company's "circular financing" exposure to cloud providers and AI firms like OpenAI and Anthropic, with Kress pushing to rein in commitments. The report corroborates earlier accounts of inflated AI demand and channel stuffing.
Jensen Huang has resigned as Nvidia CEO amid a scandal, with CFO Colette Kress stepping in as interim chief, triggering a broad selloff across global AI stocks. Nvidia fell 8.2% intraday, dropping below a $4 trillion market cap for the first time since July 2025, with over $550 billion wiped out since the board opened its investigation; CoreWeave and Nebius also slumped, while AMD and Broadcom rose 3.7% and 5.6%. The shakeup exposes risks in Nvidia's circular chip-and-infrastructure financing model and forces a repricing of the entire AI supply chain.
Nvidia announced that Jensen Huang has resigned as CEO and left the board with immediate effect, ending more than 33 years at the helm. CFO Colette Kress becomes interim CEO while retaining her finance role, and director Harvey Jones becomes the company's first board chair. The exit came three days after the board opened an outside probe into reports that Huang was a foreign intelligence target; shares fell about 10% pre-market, extending two-week losses to roughly $1.4 trillion. The next CEO will oversee over $100 billion in investments, including a planned $10 billion purchase of Anthropic shares at its IPO.
TSMC's board approved up to $500 million for OpenAI preferred stock and another $500 million for Anthropic common shares at its expected IPO price, totaling up to $1 billion. The move gives one of the biggest beneficiaries of the AI data center buildout direct stakes in leading AI developers, seen as a confidence boost for a strained AI trade, though analysts warn circular financing among investors, suppliers and customers is muddying true demand signals.
A podcast reading of Anthropic's S-1 highlights a founder-controlled structure locked in via a single Class F share holding 50.1% of votes, alongside roughly $900 billion in forward compute commitments. The hosts argue softer Q3 revenue reflects a GPU shortage rather than weak customer demand, and weigh bubble and circular-financing bear cases.