Nvidia has backed the facility lease obligations of a partner company's data center.

Should the undisclosed company default, Nvidia could be on the hook for up to $860 million. The sum will decrease over the course of the five-year lease.

In its latest 10-Q filing, Nvidia revealed the guarantee, which it said allowed the partner to "secure a limited-availability facility lease backed by our credit profile."

Some $470m has been placed in escrow by the partner, and the company already has an agreement to sell cloud capacity, which Nvidia says reduces the risk of exposure.

Should the company still default, Nvidia has the option to assume the lease for internal use or sublease.

The deal comes amid greater scrutiny over Nvidia's circular investments in companies that buy its GPUs. It has backed neoclouds CoreWeave, Nebius, Nscale, Lambda, and Crusoe, among others.

In the case of some, it has also guaranteed sales - this September, promising to purchase unsold compute capacity from CoreWeave for $6.3bn, alongside a $1.5bn deal with Lambda.

The latter cloud business in June entered into a deal with Supermicro that saw the server maker lease a 21MW Prime data center for $600m to sublease to Lambda.

Nvidia has also pledged to invest in the model makers behind the AI boom, promising as much as $100bn for OpenAI and $10bn for Anthropic. Although both deals have yet to finalize, they are tied to guarantees of GPU sales.

At the same time, Nvidia is reported to have discussed backing OpenAI's data center loans in an effort to speed up its Stargate facility expansion plans.

The company is also an investor in model makers Mistral AI, xAI, and Cohere, plans to pump $5bn into rival Intel, and $2bn into chip engineering and design firm Synopsys, and is backing a BlackRock-led data center fund.

The level of investment into feeding its own sales has caused concerns in the market, most notably with Michael Burry of 'The Big Short' fame. His claims about the company's practices prompted Nvidia to take the unusual step of asserting that it was unlike Enron, WorldCom, or Lucent.