Nvidia is looking more like the central bank of AI

Nvidia made its fortune selling the AI boom. Now it's helping finance the next chapter.

Nvidia ( NVDA ) shares initially fell about 3% after Wednesday's earnings report , then turned higher as the company's conference call got underway. Revenue came in at $96.2 billion, Data Center sales hit $89 billion, and Nvidia guided to roughly $108 billion of revenue for the current quarter.

The bigger change is happening on Nvidia's balance sheet.

The chipmaker's public and private equity holdings reached $95.6 billion at the end of July, up from less than $100 million in early 2020. Nvidia says its broader equity investments now total roughly $99 billion.

The portfolio now includes stakes in Intel ( INTC ), CoreWeave ( CRWV ), Coherent ( COHR ), Nokia ( NOK ), Synopsys ( SNPS ), and Nebius ( NBIS ), among others.

Huang sounded anything but worried about the scale of those investments. "I think the only regret that I have is that I didn't invest more and sooner," he said of Nvidia's investments in AI labs.

And those investments are only one piece of a much bigger push.

Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said frontier AI labs have "extraordinary demand" for computing power but are "growing faster than what their balance sheets and credit profiles can support."

In plain English, some of Nvidia's fastest-growing customers want more AI infrastructure than their finances can comfortably support.

And this is becoming a meaningful piece of Nvidia's business. Kress said AI labs where Nvidia expects to use its balance sheet could account for roughly a quarter of its business next year.

Investors have been comparing Nvidia to a central bank for months. Morgan Stanley has called the strategy "balance-sheet-as-a-service" — using Nvidia's financial strength to help keep its customers spending.

That now includes giving some large customers as long as a year to pay for data center purchases. Accounts receivable , or money customers still owe Nvidia, jumped to $63.1 billion, while the average collection time rose to 60 days from 45.

Nvidia is also backing some customers more directly. With some AI cloud providers, it guarantees a minimum level of revenue, helping them secure financing — then it gets a cut if revenue rises above that floor.

"We're not making loans in this model," Kress said. "We get paid twice, once on the hardware sale and again through the share of rental revenue."

It also disclosed as much as $108.5 billion of guarantees. Almost all of that — $105 billion — is tied to the SB Energy data center buildout for OpenAI .