NVIDIA Allegedly Engineered Scarcity By Funding AI Startups To Buy Its GPUs

What happened

Following the departure of now-former NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, a new report by The Wall Street Journal (via Wccftech) alleges that NVIDIA artificially inflated the ongoing GPU and memory shortage by investing in AI startups that would go on to buy NVIDIA GPUs and build data centers, in order to maintain the perception of ongoing high demand and to move an oversupply of semiconductors from TSMC. The WSJ report cites an August meeting between Huang and his senior finance team, including NVIDIA's CFO and acting CEO Colette Kress, during which Kress pushed for a reduction in circular financing agreements; Huang allegedly berated her, calling her a "deer in the headlights," after she pushed to scale back NVIDIA's $250 billion deal with OpenAI. Jensen's push for further investment into small-scale cloud providers was seemingly in response to AI hyperscalers moving away from off-the-shelf components in favor of custom solutions. These remain allegations from the report and are unconfirmed.

Impact and signal

Affected components and suppliers

Source and time

Source: TechPowerUp · 11/13/2026 · View original source