Nvidia is providing financial guarantees to small cloud companies that make a living by leasing out its GPUs, and in return is sharing in some of their revenue, The Information reported on Tuesday.
Under the arrangement, Nvidia has promised to buy back unsold inventory if the cloud companies cannot lease their GPUs, in exchange for a share of revenue, the report said.
The guarantees come with a condition that the cloud firms share some revenue with Nvidia. In revenue-sharing deals, the share Nvidia takes declines as the contract period goes on, The Information said.
The Information cited Permas and SharonAI, GPU cloud companies participating in Nvidia's financial guarantees, and three executives at other companies that do business with Nvidia.
The program is referred to internally at Nvidia as the "AI Compute Partnership".
An Nvidia spokesperson also confirmed the program exists, The Information said.
GPUs are the most expensive components in AI data centres. If Nvidia guarantees it will lease unsold GPUs, companies with low credit ratings find it easier to get loans, The Information said.
Chi-gyu Hwang
delight@d-today.co.kr