AI Summary
5 min readMonologue: NVIDIA's No IT Loads Refused Cash Dump
Ed Zitron opens with a blunt premise: NVIDIA's much-hyped "$500 billion" AI infrastructure deal with a laundry list of asset managers is essentially fiction. The memorandums of understanding signed with Apollo, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR are not worth the paper they're printed on. The actual financing will likely happen through separate, already-existing data center deals—exactly the kind already being funded. Zitron's central argument is that NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang is running a circular financing scheme to keep pace with utterly unrealistic analyst expectations, and the con is starting to fray.
The Worthless Memorandum
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What you'll learn
- 1 Timestamped Outline
- 2 (02:12) **Introduction: Why a Wednesday Monologue?** - Zitron explains the schedule shift and teases Friday's in-studio episode with Chloe Radcliffe and Ed Ongreso Jr.
- 3 (02:43) **The NVIDIA "Deal" That Wasn't** - Zitron dismantles the reported $500 billion NVIDIA financing partnership as media hype built on worthless memorandums of understanding.
- 4 (03:52) **The Pattern: Jensen Huang's Empty Promises** - Zitron establishes a track record of NVIDIA announcing massive deals that never materialize, using the $100 billion OpenAI commitment as a case study.
- 5 (04:55) **The Fine Print: "Residual Value Support Mechanism"** - Zitron decodes the opaque language from NVIDIA CFO Colette Kress's statement about guaranteeing up to 25% of project costs.
- 6 (06:20) **Jensen's Twitter Defense Falls Apart** - Zitron analyzes Huang's two-question Twitter post, exposing circular financing and meaningless buzzwords.
- 7 (07:52) **The Core Contradiction** - If real diverse demand for NVIDIA GPUs existed at analyst expectations, none of this financial wizardry would be necessary.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Guests on this episode
Show Notes
In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs through NVIDIA’s entirely-theoretical $500 billion AI infrastructure partnership with various asset managers, all to keep up with analyst expectations that it will make more than $1.6 trillion in the next three years.
Chloe’s Show Cheat - https://publictheater.org/performances-jp/2026/c/chloe-radcliffe-cheat/ - August 19th and 20th
News Story: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/10/nvidia-wall-street-asset-managers-500-billion-ai-push.html
Jensen Huang Tweet: https://x.com/JensenHuang/status/2086934705207959965?s=20
WSJ story on Anthropic IPO: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-tries-to-shore-up-investor-confidence-ahead-of-blockbuster-ipo-0ff736ad
Numbers: Consensus analyst estimates for revenue for the next three years are utterly fucking insane. NVIDIA made about $216 billion dollars in fiscal year 2026 - which ended on January 25th 2026, frustratingly - and analyst expectations have it at $393.7 billion dollars in Fiscal Year 2027, or a little under doubling its revenue year-over-year. In Fiscal Year 2028, expectations are at $565.7 billion dollars, and in Fiscal Year 2029, NVIDIA is expected to make $694 billion dollars. Over 90% of its revenues come from selling GPUs and other data center hardware.
I realize that’s a lot of numbers, so I’ll put it simply: NVIDIA is expected to sell over $1.6 trillion dollars’ worth of GPUs by January 2029, and the vast majority of its customers - including hyperscalers - are having to take out hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of debt to pay for it.
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