Nvidia's July run of deals — a $500B SK partnership, a reported ~$250B backstop on OpenAI's Ohio lease, $5B into a startup with no product — has revived the "circular financing" charge that the Santa Clara chipmaker is funding its own demand. Most of the terms remain undisclosed letters of intent.

In a single month, Santa Clara's Nvidia agreed to move more money into the companies that buy its chips than most nations spend in a year — and the size of the commitments is now feeding a familiar worry: that the AI demand Nvidia keeps citing is partly demand it is paying for itself.

The headline number is the roughly $500 billion partnership with South Korea's SK Group, anchored by an SK Hynix memory supply deal and a 2-gigawatt data center targeted for 2027. But the deals that raised eyebrows are downstream. Per Bloomberg, Nvidia is in talks to backstop up to $250 billion of OpenAI's lease on SoftBank's planned 10-gigawatt Ohio campus, and separately to help finance some $350 billion in OpenAI chip purchases. Add $1 billion for a roughly 4.5% stake in South Korea's Naver Corp. and $5 billion into Safe Superintelligence — Ilya Sutskever's lab, which has raised $9.1 billion and shipped no product.

The pattern isn't new, and that's the point. Nvidia put $100 million into CoreWeave in 2023; CoreWeave later disclosed a $6.3 billion Nvidia order and took another $2 billion from Nvidia in January. When a chipmaker funds the buildout of its own customers, the customers' orders can make demand "appear even stronger than it actually is," as San Jose State engineering professor Ahmed Banafa put it to KRON4 — a critique now echoed by Boston College's Aleksandar Tomic, the Bank for International Settlements, and short-seller Michael Burry. CEO Jensen Huang calls the circularity charge "ridiculous."

What would settle it is disclosure, and there isn't much. The SK figure is a letter of intent, not a signed $500 billion contract. The OpenAI backstop is "in talks." Whether any recipient is contractually obligated to buy Nvidia hardware — the fact that separates a strategic investment from a demand-laundering loop — has not been filed. Until it is, the loop is asserted, not proven. Watch for the definitive agreements, and for how Nvidia recognizes the revenue that comes back.