Banks and private credit firms are demanding that Nvidia post collateral of up to 25% to support loans for small AI cloud providers known as neoclouds. Lenders are refusing to offer asset backed financing for graphics processing units unless the chipmaker backs the loans, rejecting Nvidia's attempt to have Wall Street treat GPUs as a long lived investable asset class similar to commercial aircraft.

The disagreement focuses on chip depreciation, with banks underwriting GPUs on a 3 to 4 year schedule compared to Nvidia's claim that they last a decade. Morningstar has compared the strategy to dot com era vendor financing used by Cisco. While Nvidia has targeted more than $500B in third party capital for AI infrastructure, some recent deals have required other chipmakers to step in, including Broadcom financing a $42B deal for Anthropic.