Nvidia's CFO Colette Kress scaled back a planned financial guarantee for a massive Ohio data-center project after investor concerns about circular financing, but the company remains committed to using its balance sheet to power the AI boom. The world's only $5 trillion company reported blockbuster second-quarter earnings, with revenue expected to grow much faster than Wall Street analysts anticipated, driving an $442 billion one-day market cap gain. Kress outlined a growing suite of financial mechanisms, including a $500 billion financing initiative with six major Wall Street firms, credit enhancement for an unnamed AI lab to buy 2 gigawatts of computing power, and nearly $50 billion in investments in frontier AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic.

She argued these labs are growing faster than their balance sheets can support and need Nvidia to help power the flywheel until they can borrow at competitive rates. The ultimate expression of this strategy is a planned 10 gigawatt data center in Portsmouth, Ohio, where Nvidia agreed to backstop up to $105 billion of the completed value to help developer SoftBank's SB Energy raise debt. While some investors call these initiatives polarizing, others say they support near- and medium-term revenue and earnings upside.