Nvidia is buying customers that will likely have increasing need for Nvidia. Those investment dollars will be spent on Nvidia. Future dollars will be spent on Nvidia.
Second order effects are that everyone serviced by AI today will need even more AI tomorrow. Nvidia is there for that. They're increasing AI proliferation.
By increasing the number of engineers, dollars, watts spent on GPU, Nvidia grows its market.
The added benefit here is that Nvidia gets to share in the upside if any of these companies succeed in their goals.
It's as if Microsoft had Azure back before the doctom boom and took investments in Google, Amazon, and Facebook in exchange for hosting them. (And maybe a few misfires, like WebVan.)
Why? Wash trading is about selling and then requiring the same asset for tax purposes. How is this analogous, other than that you presumably dislike both practices?
In crypto, wash trading usually refers to the practice of exchanges or project creators colluding to trade the same asset back and forth in order to make the volume/liquidity/popularity look greater than it is.
- "Our coin hit $100M daily volume, get on this rocketship before it's too late!"
- "Our exchange does $1B annually, so you know we're trustworthy!"
- "Hey investors, look at the massive demand for our GPUs (driven by the company we invested $100B)!"
Yes, when NVIDIA gives assets to a third party in return for a stake in the company, and then that company uses those assets to secure loans, and those loans are predicated on the value of that asset, thats a single asset being claimed by multiple parties who will all write in their books the value of that asset.
Its generating the facade of activity, the same.
You are right theres no public ledger for the wash trading, but the fact that the underlying real physical asset is NVIDIAs product, lends the same intentional activity: to leverage apparent markeet activity to inflate the value of assets.