Nvidia made its fortune selling the AI boom. Now it’s helping finance the next chapter.

Nvidia (NVDA) shares initially fell about 3% after Wednesday’s earnings report, then turned higher as the company’s conference call got underway. Revenue came in at $96.2 billion, Data Center sales hit $89 billion, and Nvidia guided to roughly $108 billion of revenue for the current quarter.

The bigger change is happening on Nvidia’s balance sheet.

The chipmaker’s public and private equity holdings reached $95.6 billion at the end of July, up from less than $100 million in early 2020. Nvidia says its broader equity investments now total roughly $99 billion.

The portfolio now includes stakes in Intel (INTC), CoreWeave (CRWV), Coherent (COHR), Nokia (NOK), Synopsys (SNPS), and Nebius (NBIS), among others.

And those investments are only one piece of a much bigger push.

Nvidia says AI clouds and model makers have huge demand for computing power but “lack the ability to secure long-term infrastructure contracts and investment-grade financing capacity.”

In plain English, some of Nvidia’s fastest-growing customers want more AI infrastructure than their finances can comfortably support.

Nvidia is stepping into the gap.

Investors have been comparing Nvidia to a central bank for months. Morgan Stanley has called the strategy “balance-sheet-as-a-service” — using Nvidia’s financial strength to help keep its customers spending.

That now includes giving some large customers as long as a year to pay for data center purchases. Accounts receivable, or money customers still owe Nvidia, jumped to $63.1 billion, while the average collection time rose to 60 days from 45.

Nvidia is also backing some customers more directly.

The company has $36 billion of agreements with AI cloud providers that buy Nvidia hardware while Nvidia commits to using some of their computing capacity. It also disclosed as much as $108.5 billion of guarantees. Almost all of that — $105 billion — is tied to the SB Energy data center buildout for OpenAI.

That support is not money Nvidia is handing over today. It phases in as nine data centers come online beginning around fiscal 2029 and shrinks as OpenAI makes payments.

Nvidia is also trying to pull far more outside money into the buildout. The company says it has preliminary agreements with large investors aimed at channeling more than $500 billion into AI infrastructure.

The idea is simple: Nvidia does not want to pay for the whole boom itself. It wants to help make the projects easier to finance.