By Stephen Bartholomeusz

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Last month, the company signed a $US1.5 billion deal with Lambda, a small AI cloud service provider, in which it leased back 18,000 GPU servers it had previously sold to Lambda. It also has equity in Lambda. The deal, as will occur with the new OpenAI relationship, gives Lambda the revenue to buy more Nvidia chips.

A week ago, Nvidia signed a $US6.3 billion deal to buy cloud capacity from a data centre operator CoreWeave, in which it has a 7 per cent shareholding.

The [OpenAI] deal ensures that Nvidia’s place at the centre of the scramble to develop and deploy AI is protected, and a key customer is locked up and given more sustainable finances.

CoreWeave rents out Nvidia’s powerful GPU servers to its customers. In effect, Nvidia has underwritten any capacity that CoreWeave hasn’t been able to sell to third parties, while also underwriting a major customers’ continuing financial capacity to acquire its chips.

The OpenAI deal has those same elements of mutual reinforcement of supplier and customer. A new Nvidia business model is emerging quite rapidly.