To combat accounting allegations from investors like Michael Burry, NVIDIA's investor relations team sent a private 7-page memo to Wall Street analysts. This direct refutation, explicitly stating "NVIDIA says it's not Enron," reveals a high level of concern over market narratives, even for a financially dominant company.
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Michael Burry's thesis is that aggressive stock-based compensation (SBC) at companies like Nvidia significantly distorts their valuations. By treating SBC as a true owner's cost, a stock appearing to trade at 30 times earnings might actually be closer to 60 times, mirroring dot-com era accounting concerns.
To counter the competitive threat from Google's TPUs, NVIDIA avoids direct price cuts that would hurt its gross margins. Instead, it offers strategic equity investments to major customers like OpenAI, effectively providing a "partner discount" to secure their business and maintain its dominant market position.
NVIDIA's financing of customers who buy its GPUs is a strategic move to accelerate the creation of AGI, their ultimate market. It also serves a defensive purpose: ensuring the massive capital expenditure cycle doesn't halt, as a market downturn could derail the entire AI infrastructure buildout that their business relies on.
The debate over AI chip depreciation highlights a flaw in traditional accounting. GAAP was designed for physical assets with predictable lifecycles, not for digital infrastructure like GPUs whose value creation is dynamic. This mismatch leads to accusations of financial manipulation where firms are simply following outdated rules.
Some tech companies have doubled the depreciable life of their AI hardware (e.g., from 3 to 6 years) for accounting purposes. This inflates reported earnings, but it contradicts the economic reality that rapid innovation is shortening the chips' actual useful life, creating a significant red flag for earnings quality.
The high-stakes competition for AI dominance is so intense that investigative journalism can trigger immediate, massive corporate action. A report in The Information about OpenAI exploring Google's TPUs directly prompted NVIDIA's CEO to call OpenAI's CEO and strike a major investment deal to secure the business.
When asked about AI's potential dangers, NVIDIA's CEO consistently reacts with aggressive dismissal. This disproportionate emotional response suggests not just strategic evasion but a deep, personal fear or discomfort with the technology's implications, a stark contrast to his otherwise humble public persona.
Jensen Huang counters accusations of inflating revenue by investing in customers. He clarifies the investment in OpenAI is a separate, opportunistic financial bet, while chip sales are driven by market demand and funded independently by OpenAI's own capital raising—not by NVIDIA's investment.
NVIDIA sent a private memo to Wall Street analysts refuting accounting criticisms. When the memo leaked, it created a negative public news cycle ('NVIDIA says it's not Enron'), forcing the company into a defensive position and amplifying the skepticism it was trying to discreetly manage.
Despite being the world's largest company, NVIDIA issued scheduled, press-release-style tweets defending its products against Google's. This reactive communication comes across as insecure and is less effective than a nuanced, conversational response from its CEO would be, undermining its dominant market position.