Nvidia is working on a fresh round of AI infrastructure deals potentially worth more than $750 billion, Bloomberg reported, accelerating a pattern of investment that critics say inflates demand and valuations across the sector. The response from the debt market was unusually direct.
Nvidia’s five-year credit default swap spread surged to a record 82 basis points on Monday, its largest single-day intraday increase since the contract began actively trading in November 2025, according to ICE Data Services figures cited by Bloomberg. Credit default swaps are effectively insurance against a bond issuer failing to pay.
What is in the $750bn
An AI initiative with SK Group, parent of chipmaker SK Hynix, was unveiled late Friday and is worth more than $500 billion by Nvidia’s own accounting. The two will build more than two gigawatts of AI data centres on the Korean Peninsula, roughly the power required for 1.5 million homes.
Separately, Nvidia is in talks to guarantee as much as $250 billion so OpenAI can lease a 10-gigawatt data centre campus that a SoftBank subsidiary is developing in southern Ohio. It is also discussing financing a further $350 billion of OpenAI chip purchases.
Nvidia also said late Friday it will invest $1 billion in Naver Corp to help fund an AI data centre under construction in South Korea, developed jointly with Brookfield. The funding will let Naver more than triple the size of the facility, and its shares rose more than 8% in Seoul.
The Sutskever deal
On Monday Nvidia announced a long-term partnership with Safe Superintelligence, the lab founded by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, reportedly worth $5 billion. Nvidia said the arrangement gave it “rare access into the company’s closely guarded research.”
The deal gives SSI access to Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform and will increase its compute by an order of magnitude. For a company with no product and two years of near-total silence, the validation is arguably worth as much as the silicon.
Why the market reacted
The concern is structural rather than moral. Nvidia takes equity stakes in or guarantees debt for customers such as OpenAI and CoreWeave, which then spend the money on Nvidia hardware, a loop that can make demand look stronger than underlying end-user appetite.
“While Nvidia’s investments and partnerships reinforce confidence in long-term AI buildouts, investors remain concerned about circular financing,” said Gary Tan, a portfolio manager at Allspring Global Investments. “Capital is increasingly being used to fund future AI customers and infrastructure deployments.”
Billy Leung, an investment strategist at Global X Management, framed the OpenAI guarantee as a warning sign rather than a bullish one. “It’s as much a reminder of funding strain in the AI buildout as it is a demand signal,” he said.
Both the IMF and the Bank for International Settlements have flagged AI circular financing as a systemic downside risk.
Huang’s rebuttal
Jensen Huang has consistently rejected the framing, arguing Nvidia’s stakes are small relative to what its partners raise elsewhere. “It’s a small percentage of the amount of money that they ultimately have to go raise,” he said of the CoreWeave investment in January, adding that “the idea that it is circular is, it’s ridiculous.”
On the Korean deals he was expansive. “This is the golden ages for Korea,” Huang told Bloomberg Television, noting the $500 billion figure covers Nvidia’s memory chip purchases as well as SK Group buying Nvidia supercomputers.
That last point matters. The SK arrangement flows in both directions, since Nvidia needs high-bandwidth memory that Hynix and Samsung dominate, which makes it a supply deal as much as a demand one.
Not just Nvidia
Vendor guarantees have spread across the industry. Google agreed to backstop lease payments at five data centre sites for Anthropic, helping the OpenAI rival obtain what amounts to a $35 billion loan.
Nvidia has extended credit further down the stack too. It has offered AI startups compute now and payment later, a structure that solves a customer’s cash problem while booking the revenue.
Much of the resulting obligation sits outside standard debt disclosure. Big Tech’s off-balance-sheet AI commitments have been estimated at around $1.65 trillion, which is why guarantees rather than headline borrowing have become the metric to watch.
The tally so far
Nvidia has announced more than $540 billion of such deals in 2026 alone, excluding the potential OpenAI arrangement. It holds stakes in OpenAI, Marvell, IREN, CoreWeave, and Nebius.
Monday cost it. Nvidia shares fell close to 5% to $196.51, stripping roughly $250 billion from its market value and handing the title of world’s most valuable company back to Apple.
The OpenAI negotiations are early stage and could collapse or change terms, and neither Nvidia nor OpenAI commented. What is already settled is that the credit market has decided this pattern carries a price, and it has started charging for it.
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