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

Key points

• Nvidia is reportedly discussing a $250 billion financing guarantee for an OpenAI data centre campus in Ohio, first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
• Nvidia has already 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, dragging 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 cash.
• 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, meaning it would guarantee 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 Nvidia 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, the kind of scale that would make it one of the largest computing facilities ever built.

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

In short: a supplier lending money to its own customer is a pattern that ended badly before.

In the late 1990s, telecom equipment makers gave loans to the phone companies buying their gear. Sales looked great. Then the phone companies ran out of cash, stopped paying, and the equipment makers took enormous losses. Cramer was working on Wall Street 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 striking. Nvidia has invested $30 billion in OpenAI and $10 billion in Anthropic, two of its biggest chip customers. It has also backed several 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, yes, Nvidia chips.

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 rounds to fund its enormous infrastructure bills.

For ordinary investors, the practical takeaway is straightforward: watch whether OpenAI's revenues grow fast enough to service that debt on their own. If they do, this is a business deal. If they do not, the company that sold them 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 a financially strong company. His objection is to the structure of the deal, not the company itself. History, he said, is the only reason he is raising the flag.

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, software tools 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.