Nvidia will cover up to 25% of value lost on its own GPUs pledged as loan collateral

TechCrunch reported on 13 August 2026 that Nvidia, together with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR, committed up to $500 billion toward building AI data centres — and that Nvidia will guarantee with its own money that chips used as collateral in those deals retain value, covering up to 25% of any unexpected depreciation. The structure lets data-centre owners borrow against GPUs while shielding lenders from depreciation risk, which sustains a secondary market for ageing hardware and with it demand for Nvidia parts as they age. The report flags the wrong-way risk: Nvidia's obligations grow precisely when demand and revenues weaken, a pattern it compares to Lucent's vendor financing during the telecom bubble.

What it means A residual-value guarantee on GPUs is what makes older accelerators financeable, which should push down the cost of second-hand inference capacity — the same mechanism that concentrates the downside on one balance sheet if utilisation ever falls.