From its founding in 1993 until just a few short years ago, Nvidia’s business model was pretty simple: make the best graphics cards on the market, sell them to PC gamers with more disposable income than sense, earn some decent coin.
One crypto boom, one AI boom and one of the greatest business transformations in corporate history later, gamers had been replaced by hyperscalers and the invoices had gained a frankly crazy number of zeroes. But the model was essentially the same: make great chips and sell them.
As the AI boom — or bubble, depending on which podcasts you listen to — enters its weirder, pricklier phase, the model is becoming a bit more complicated. There’s an old joke in tech that every sufficiently successful company inevitably becomes either an advertising business or a bank and, with increasing gusto, Nvidia has chosen bank.
The company’s shares fell 5% overnight following reports it is discussing two enormous financing arrangements tied to OpenAI’s proposed data centre campus in Ohio.
