NVIDIA and Broadcom Offer Billions in Loans to Boost AI Chip Sales - 조선일보

This is not a sales incentive; it is a structural weapon. By injecting capital directly into the buyer's balance sheet, NVIDIA and Broadcom convert a one-time transaction into a multi-year architectural lock-in. The technical cascade is immediate: HBM pull-forward demand accelerates, CoWoS packaging utilization jumps, and the CUDA/UALink ecosystem deepens its gravitational hold. Competitors unable to match this financing depth—AMD, Intel's Gaudi, and every fabless AI startup—confront a capital moat no roadmap can bridge. Regulatory exposure is material. Vendor financing at this scale mirrors the 1990s Intel-OEM subsidy structures that eventually drew FTC scrutiny. More critically, if loan flows reach entities in export-restricted jurisdictions, the financing channel itself becomes a compliance vector, inflating audit and legal overhead across the supply chain. The 12-to-24-month trajectory: the AI infrastructure bottleneck is shifting from wafer capacity to balance-sheet leverage. Hyperscaler balance sheets will absorb vendor debt, forming a highly correlated risk cluster. If application-layer revenue disappoints, the correction propagates up the financing chain. This is the 2000 telecom fiber bubble, compressed into eighteen months, with thinner equity cushions on every participant.