Nvidia pauses AI Compute Partnership deals

Nvidia has paused some deals under its AI Compute Partnership, a financing initiative that offered credit support to AI cloud companies in exchange for a share of their revenue. The pause, reported by the Wall Street Journal, occurred last week, less than two months after the program was announced in July. Nvidia employees reportedly expressed concerns that the program could attract antitrust scrutiny and that Nvidia was dictating how customers operate. Nvidia told some cloud providers they could only rent chips to approved customers and preferred capacity be distributed among multiple smaller firms. Under the proposed deals, Nvidia would receive 50% of revenue above a threshold. Nvidia disclosed $36 billion in commitments under the program in its quarterly filing. The company said the program is still in place and evolving due to high demand. The pause comes amid investor scrutiny over circular deals that could inflate demand, and follows Nvidia's arrangement of $500 billion in financing and a $105 billion guarantee for OpenAI's data center lease.