From selling chips to renting data center facilities, NVIDIA's $50 billion data center lease has been exposed.

Nvidia is betting on AI infrastructure at an unprecedented scale, and the resulting concerns in the credit market are rising simultaneously.

According to a report by the Financial Times on Tuesday citing five people familiar with the matter, Nvidia has signed leases worth up to 50 billion US dollars, becoming a tenant of Hut 8's data center campus in Texas.

In the trading day before the news was released, Nvidia's stock price plummeted by nearly 5%, losing its title as the world's highest market value company at the same time; in the credit market, the intraday increase of Nvidia's 5-year Credit Default Swap (CDS) hit a historical record since the contract started active trading, and the market's concerns about Nvidia's large-scale assumption of AI financing obligations have risen significantly.

A Nvidia spokesperson neither confirmed nor denied the above lease report, only stating that the company is cooperating with ecosystem partners through the DSX AI factory architecture to accelerate the deployment of efficient AI infrastructure. Hut 8 did not respond to Reuters' request for comment before press time.

01 $50 Billion Lease: Nvidia May Become the Main Tenant of Hut 8's Texas Campus

Hut 8 disclosed last week that its 1GW Beacon Point campus has signed a long-term contract with a base term of 15 years and a base contract value of 19.6 billion US dollars. If all renewal options are exercised, the total value can rise to 50.2 billion US dollars. At that time, Hut 8 did not disclose the identity of the tenant, only referring to the other party as an "existing investment-grade customer" that will deploy computing equipment in the campus to support large-scale AI training and operations.

The Financial Times cited people familiar with the matter as saying that the above tenant is Nvidia. The report also pointed out that Nvidia may sublet the property to its "neocloud" partners - these partners purchase Nvidia GPUs and sell AI cloud computing services to the market.

A Nvidia spokesperson said that DSX is the company's full-stack architecture that integrates its own technology and partner enterprise equipment to design, build and operate large-scale AI data centers.

02 CDS Surges to Record High, Credit Market Sounds Alarm for Circular Financing

At the same time, Nvidia's credit market signals are attracting attention. Data from ICE Data Services shows that on Monday, Nvidia's 5-year CDS rose by about 14 basis points at one point during the session, peaking at about 82 basis points per year, marking the largest intraday increase since the contract began active trading last November.

This trend occurred against the backdrop of intensive exposure of a number of major financing reports. Nvidia said last week that the cooperation plan with SK Hynix's parent company is worth more than 500 billion US dollars; in addition, Nvidia is negotiating to provide up to 250 billion US dollars in guarantees to OpenAI to help it lease US data center computing power - which may be one of the largest financing transactions between the company and its customers. Nvidia is also in consultations to provide financing for the $350 billion US project for OpenAI to purchase chips.

"The capital expenditure required to build AI infrastructure is extremely huge, and the debt market is being flooded by massive supply," said Sal Naro, Chief Investment Officer of Coherence Credit Strategies, "The 'financial alchemy' driven by opaque, off-balance sheet transactions and inter-company relationships is worrying and may lead to a credit rating downgrade."

03 Circular Financing Structure Sparks Market Controversy

Critics have been warning about the circular nature of these transactions for months: Nvidia provides financing or takes equity stakes in some companies, which in turn usually purchase or use Nvidia chips. The risk of such arrangements is that they may distort commercial incentives and lead to improper decision-making; once AI demand falls short of expectations, related losses may also be amplified.

It is worth noting that such financing often requires an investment-grade credit rating to be established, while AI companies that are rapidly burning cash such as OpenAI and Anthropic cannot meet this rating threshold on their own. The endorsement and support of large enterprises is the key to helping the relevant AI infrastructure debt obtain a higher rating.

"While Nvidia's investments and cooperation have boosted market confidence in long-term AI infrastructure construction, investors still have concerns about circular financing," said Gary Tan, portfolio manager at Allspring Global Investments, "More and more capital is being used to fund future AI customers and infrastructure deployments."

As Nvidia's financial involvement in the AI infrastructure sector continues to expand, the divergent trends between the credit market and the stock market may become an important observation window for investors to assess the risk exposure of this chip giant.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Hard AI", written by a researcher focusing on technology production and R&D, and published with authorization from 36Kr.