Jim Cramer Says Nvidia's AI Financing Deals Smell Like the Dot-Com Bubble

Key points

• Nvidia is in discussions about a $250 billion financing guarantee for an OpenAI data centre campus in Ohio, first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
• The chip giant has invested $30 billion in OpenAI in March 2025 and $10 billion in Anthropic in 2024.
• Nvidia shares fell more than 4% on Monday after the report emerged, pulling other semiconductor stocks down with them.
• CNBC's Jim Cramer compared the arrangement to late-1990s telecom deals that collapsed when customers ran out of money.
• OpenAI, valued at over $800 billion by private investors in March 2025, confidentially filed for an IPO in June 2025 but has not set a public date.

What exactly is Nvidia being asked to do?

Nvidia is in talks to act as a financial backstop, guaranteeing up to $250 billion in lease and construction debt for a massive AI data centre campus OpenAI wants to build in Ohio. The guarantee covers the building, not the chips that would go inside it.

CNBC confirmed the arrangement on Monday after the Wall Street Journal broke the story. Nvidia declined to comment. The campus is planned at 10 gigawatts of power capacity, which would place it among the largest computing facilities ever built.

For context on how chip-stock sentiment has been shifting, our 29 July story "FTSE 100 hits four-month high as investors pull money from AI and chip stocks" found London's main index climbing while Asian semiconductor shares fell sharply on the same anxieties.

Why does this remind Cramer of the dot-com crash?

A supplier lending money to its own customer is a pattern that ended badly before.

Through the late 1990s, telecom equipment makers gave loans to the phone companies buying their gear. Sales looked great. Then buyers ran dry, stopped honouring debts, and equipment makers absorbed enormous losses. Cramer traded through all of it.

"What we learned in 2000 is that you don't lend to companies who buy your goods," he said on Monday's Mad Money.

The parallel here is hard to ignore. Nvidia has put $30 billion into OpenAI and $10 billion into Anthropic, two of its biggest chip customers. It has also backed cloud computing companies that rent out Nvidia-powered servers. Now it may guarantee a quarter-trillion dollars in debt for a facility OpenAI will fill with Nvidia chips. That is circular, and Cramer's point is simply that circular financing felt fine right up until it didn't.

"Nvidia shouldn't make these guarantees even if it has all the money in the world," Cramer said. "Just history, that's all, just history."

Should investors be worried?

Cramer is not calling a crash. He is flagging a specific risk: confidence can evaporate fast when a supplier's revenue depends on customers whose own spending relies on outside money.

"If OpenAI can actually afford to pay for these chips, perhaps because it comes public, then Nvidia's in terrific shape," he said. "If the buyer can't pay, well, that's a different story."

OpenAI filed confidentially for an IPO (an initial public offering, where a private company sells shares to the public for the first time) in June 2025. No timeline has been announced. Until it lists, the company depends on private investment to fund its enormous infrastructure bills.

Watch whether OpenAI's revenues grow fast enough to service that debt on their own. A yes makes this a business deal. A no means the company that sold the shovels is also holding the mortgage.

"There are so many companies counting on the data centre for their earnings," Cramer said. "If the market decides it doesn't want to fund any more data centres, we're back in 2000."

He was careful to praise Nvidia as financially strong. His objection is to the structure of the deal, not the company.

Common questions

Does this affect me if I don't own Nvidia stock?

Possibly, yes. A broad pullback in AI infrastructure spending would ripple through cloud services and consumer apps that rely on the same data centres.

Is Nvidia's $250 billion guarantee confirmed?

Not yet. As of Monday, it remains a reported discussion. Nvidia has not confirmed or denied it, and no deal has been announced.

What is OpenAI's IPO, and when might it happen?

An IPO is when a private company sells shares to the general public on a stock exchange. OpenAI filed confidentially in June 2025 but has not given a public date for its listing.