$NVDA's Gross Margin May Not Be as Clean as It Looks, Ben Thompson Argues

Nvidia's gross margin looks untouched, but Stratechery's Ben Thompson says the cut just moved off the income statement, according to remarks on the Invest Like the Best podcast with host Patrick O'Shaughnessy.
Thompson said Nvidia reportedly backstops roughly 25% of neocloud partners' financing and guarantees to buy back compute through 2030, allowing partners to borrow more cheaply to purchase Nvidia GPUs. He argued that risk doesn't disappear — it shifts off the reported gross margin line into vendor financing and equity stakes. He added that the bigger threat isn't a rival chip but hyperscalers' lower cost of capital, noting Google already sells TPU capacity externally, including 20% to Anthropic, while Amazon has signaled similar plans for Trainium.
Michael Burry has built a public short thesis, including on Nebius, centered on similar circular AI-financing dynamics that Thompson described on Nvidia's side. Nvidia's reported roughly 75% gross margin, per Thompson, "doesn't read clean anymore," with vendor-financing and equity-backstop deal volume suggested as a shadow indicator of real margin erosion.