For years, Nvidia and the giant cloud companies appeared to have a comfortable bargain. Nvidia supplied the processors that made artificial intelligence possible; Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta bought them in enormous quantities and built the data centres needed to turn computing power into services. That bargain is now becoming a strategic rivalry. The hyperscalers have discovered that depending indefinitely on a single chipmaker is expensive and strategically dangerous. All four are developing their own AI accelerators, with Google and Amazon already having substantial experience and Microsoft and Meta pushing their own designs. Custom silicon will not necessarily displace Nvidia’s general-purpose GPUs, but even partial substitution could weaken Nvidia’s extraordinary pricing power.

Nvidia’s response is revealing. Its proposed $500bn financing partnership with some of Wall Street’s biggest investment firms is not simply a way of finding money for more data centres. It is an attempt to ensure that the expansion of AI computing continues to run through Nvidia’s ecosystem even as its biggest customers try to reduce their dependence on it. The scale of the proposed financing is striking, but........

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