Huang Sees AI Cloud Demand Soaring, but Capital Is the Bottleneck
Huang Sees AI Cloud Demand Soaring, but Capital Is the Bottleneck
At Nvidia’s GTC conference in Berlin on Thursday, CEO Jensen Huang made his diagnosis of the AI infrastructure boom plain: demand is not the weak link. “The demand for the neo clouds is off the charts,” he told CNBC, calling their capabilities “extraordinary.”
Neoclouds — specialist cloud providers built around AI computing — are racing to add data centers and chips. But Huang said the expansion has run into a more prosaic obstacle: money. “What is missing in the middle is the working capital to fuel that growth,” he said, arguing that demand for financing now exceeds its availability.
That optimism lands as investors are taking the opposite cue from the market. CoreWeave shares have fallen 50% over six months amid scrutiny of its debt-funded buildout; the company had $35.6 billion in debt as of June, while HSBC has warned the stock could fall at least another 35%. Nebius, CoreWeave, Iren and Applied Digital were all lower in premarket trading Thursday, underscoring fears that returns from vast AI spending may arrive slowly.
Huang’s answer is that financing will adapt. He said Nvidia is working to make its computing hardware easier to finance, describing it as an emerging asset class, and has previously said CoreWeave’s “strength is improving every day.”
Europe adds another constraint: power. With energy scarce and expensive, Huang said local infrastructure is essential before the region can build an AI economy that “will terminate in Europe.” Nvidia has committed nearly $10 billion across European companies, universities and research institutions, betting that more regional neoclouds can turn that bottleneck into a homegrown AI flywheel.
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