Jensen Huang used a Goldman Sachs stage on Thursday to argue that Nvidia's unusual position in the AI economy — investor in some of its own biggest customers — is not the circular financing that bubble-watchers fear.
"Well, it's not circular because we put a little bit of money in, and a lot of money comes back," the Nvidia CEO said at the Communacopia + Technology conference, per TechCrunch. "I look at the spreadsheet, we put in $1 and $100 comes back in. Is that circular? If that is, let's do more of that." Nvidia does not invest until it has seen real customer contracts generating revenue on the other side, he said, claiming he has reviewed $100 billion of such agreements: "I'm not taking any risks. I need a sure thing."
Huang also restated the forecast that has defined Nvidia's year: roughly 70% year-over-year revenue growth in the next fiscal year, guidance first issued with last month's record quarter and far above the ~44% Wall Street had modeled. Analysts expect the company to close the current fiscal year at about $400 billion in revenue, which would put next year near $680 billion.
He argued Nvidia can see demand further out than most suppliers because it sits in every layer of the stack. "Most people think Nvidia builds a chip. I mean, you need airplanes to ship what we build," he said, describing a single rack-scale GPU system at $8.5 million with NVLink, 2 million parts and 250,000 kilowatts — and noting that orders for one configuration, 36 Grace CPUs paired with 72 Blackwell GPUs, are growing 27% month over month.
Whether that resilience holds is the central question of the AI trade. Huang concedes a large share of current demand comes from AI-native startups spending freshly raised capital, a mix expected to shift as the industry matures and gets more efficient with compute. Nvidia's answer is that it tracks "every single gigawatt of land, power, shell around the world," giving it visibility competitors lack. The critics' answer, familiar from every previous infrastructure boom, is that a supplier's view into its own customers' commitments is not the same thing as end demand.
