The entire 1999 telecom vendor-financing bubble — Lucent, Nortel, Cisco, all nine suppliers combined — was $25.6 billion.
Nvidia is in talks to guarantee $250 billion. By itself. In one deal.
Michael Burry's response: "Around and around we go."
Vendor financing is when the supplier lends the customer the money to buy the supplier's product. Revenue goes up. So does the risk you're carrying. Lucent wrote off ~$3.5B in customer loans and got charged by the SEC over $1.148B of improperly booked revenue.
To be fair: a guarantee isn't a loan, Nvidia isn't Lucent (~75% gross margins, ~$4.7T market cap), and inflation-adjusted it's 5x the old bubble, not 10x.
But the market voted today. Nvidia offered to guarantee $250 billion and lost $259 billion of its own market value in the same session.
Apple is the most valuable company in the world again.
$NVDA $AAPL $ORCL