My ‘I’m Not Enron’ t-shirt has people asking a lot of questions…

“There is no neocloud that exists without [Nvidia CEO] Jensen [Huang],” says Saari. That makes neoclouds, in effect, extensions of Nvidia, he says. And none of them make money, so to expand, they must take on debt.

If we look at these as being, metaphorically, Nvidia’s special purpose vehicles, then it doesn’t really matter if the companies are any good or will survive in the long term. Their job is to boost Nvidia’s sales. Even OpenAI, also an Nvidia investment, kind of falls into this category — because the massive data center buildout that OpenAI wants the government to backstop sure involves an awful lot of Nvidia chips.

If you are old enough, or possessed of a certain kind of disposition, you may be thinking, Wait a minute, aren’t you describing Enron? And uh, in some sense, yes! Enron’s whole thing was special purpose vehicles with extremely speculative valuations that were used to take on debt, Luria notes. But Enron lied about what it was doing, and that’s fraud and illegal. (It also got up to other illegal stuff besides.) Nvidia’s relationship with CoreWeave is all happening in plain sight. So are all the relationships with the other neocloud companies. It kind of seems like the tech company version of the GameStop open pump-and-dump.

“It’s not good behavior, and it’s not healthy behavior,” Luria says. “But it’s legal. Any investor can see this. Many are just choosing not to.”