Wall Street Is Obsessing Over Nvidia's $105 Billion Circular Financing Structure With OpenAI. Here's the More Important Deal No One Is Talking About.

NVDA is backing OpenAI's Ohio data center project with up to $105 billion in residual value guarantees—a structure Wall Street has criticized as circular financing where NVDA effectively funds infrastructure that buys its own GPUs. But the article flags a separate, under-discussed deal: NVDA's reported $12.9 billion acquisition of Hugging Face, the open-source AI model platform. The Hugging Face deal positions NVDA to control the marketplace that determines which chips AI developers order across the ecosystem, giving it leverage beyond direct hardware sales. The OpenAI financing locks in near-term GPU volume but relies on NVDA guaranteeing the residual value of its own equipment. The Hugging Face acquisition, if completed at $12.9 billion, would plant NVDA at the center of model distribution and developer workflow—a strategic chokepoint as AI infrastructure spending fragments across hyperscalers like AMZN and others. The source is The Motley Fool.