Nvidia pauses AI cloud revenue-share deals

Nvidia has hit pause on some of the revenue-share deals it uses to help smaller AI clouds buy GPUs. The company says it has not frozen the whole program.

The Wall Street Journal story, carried by Reuters and Quartz, says Nvidia paused parts of the AI Compute Partnership it launched in July 2026. Nvidia later denied freezing its AI cloud commitments outright. How wide the pause actually is remains unsettled.

The partnership is not a simple loan. It bundles credit support so a smaller cloud can finance chips, a backstop to buy back unused GPU capacity, and a revenue share on top. Nvidia and each provider set a base hourly rate that covers the provider's costs. Nvidia then takes 50% of any revenue above that line, according to the reporting.

A quarterly filing this week put about $36 billion of commitments under the program, on agreements that typically run six years. Nvidia expects that figure to shrink as providers find other customers. The $36 billion is a commitment, not booked revenue.

The pause is not about the split. Reporting ties it to internal worry about antitrust exposure, specifically how far Nvidia can dictate a customer's business. In the program's early weeks, Nvidia told providers they had to vet renters through an approval process and made clear it wanted capacity spread across many smaller AI firms rather than parked with one large buyer. Those terms irritated some prospective partners. Tom's Hardware said the leasing-to-approved-customers restriction was part of what partners resisted, even as Nvidia denied pausing the initiative after that backlash.

Both versions are in circulation at once. Whether this is a full stop, a rewrite, or a fold into a differently structured program is still open.

The forward case is still on the record. On Wednesday's earnings call, finance chief Colette Kress told investors the revenue share could bring in billions of dollars over the medium to long term. That is a program Nvidia is reworking under pressure, not one it has walked away from.

The pause lands days after Nvidia posted a $96.2 billion quarter and guided to $108 billion. The approved-customer clause, not the 50% split, is the part that appears to have broken.

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