Doug Kass: Move Over Warsh, Nvidia Might Be Lender of Last Resort

Who really is the most powerful banker in the world right now? Who has more impact on rates and the economy?

Is it Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh? Or, is it Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang?

Has AI chip giant Nvidia now in effect become the central bank and lender of last resort? 

According to a report in TipRanks, the chipmaker “may be helping cloud software company Oracle (ORCL) finance new AI data centers, according to TD Cowen.”

The suggestion is that Nvidia could be “guaranteeing some lease payments or renting facilities itself before subleasing them to Oracle.”

It does not stop. Does Nvidia now need to finance and backstop Oracle (ORCL) along with everything else? 

The Nvidia balance sheet soon may be bigger than the Fed’s at the rate the company is financing the economy to dig holes and fill them back up, so Nvidia can recognize revenue. The balance sheet and cash flow statement tell a very different story than earnings do. Amazing that generally accepted accounting principles allow for this. 

Then I still wonder: Does this industry have any chance of working? It still seems at the frontier lab-level, which underpins everything, that the more numbers that come out, the less it makes sense. It seems this business does not and cannot scale. With every dollar of additional revenue, even at this size, comes more than an additional dollar of expense. As noted in “More Tales” this morning, Anthropic outside the accounting charge still lost $8.7 billion on $16 billion of revenue in the first six months of 2026. 

Sixteen billion dollars is a lot of revenue, and Anthropic still lost 50 cents on every dollar. This is why the company resorts to trying to report earnings before expenses. It has $518 billion of commitments over the next decade. 

Does Anthropic have a bat phone connected to the Central Bank of Nvidia?

At the time of publication, Kass had no position in any security mentioned.