---
title: "Nvidia bankrolled its own GPU customers as an 'avalanche' of TSMC wafers loomed, WSJ reports"
description: "Nvidia took 19 percent of TSMC's revenue last year, so whether interim chief Colette Kress unwinds the financing that propped up GPU demand is now a TSMC question, priced daily in its New York shares."
publisher: "The Inference"
section: "Chips"
published: 2026-11-15T15:27:32.280Z
modified: 2026-11-15T15:27:32.280Z
canonical: https://theinference.org/article/nvidia-bankrolled-its-own-gpu-customers-as-an-avalanche-of-tsmc-wafers-loomed-wsj-reports
language: en
keywords: "Nvidia, TSMC, Chips, Semiconductors, AI Capex"
---

# Nvidia bankrolled its own GPU customers as an 'avalanche' of TSMC wafers loomed, WSJ reports

> Nvidia took 19 percent of TSMC's revenue last year, so whether interim chief Colette Kress unwinds the financing that propped up GPU demand is now a TSMC question, priced daily in its New York shares.

## The charge: a shortage Nvidia financed

[Nvidia](https://theinference.org/markets/companies/nvidia) said on Thursday November 12 that [Jensen Huang](https://theinference.org/markets/people/jensen-huang) had resigned as president and chief executive, handing the company to finance chief [Colette Kress](https://theinference.org/markets/people/colette-kress) as interim chief [1]. The exit came days after he admitted an affair with an alleged Chinese spy [1].

That evening, the Wall Street Journal reported that at an August meeting Huang told his senior finance team the wafers and memory Nvidia had committed to buy from [Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing](https://theinference.org/markets/companies/tsmc) Company, the world's largest contract chipmaker, were "coming at him like an avalanche" [2][3]. The trigger, per the report, was [the biggest cloud providers moving to chips of their own](https://theinference.org/article/amazon-will-sell-trainium-chips-outside-aws-in-late-2027-into-a-market-nvidia-holds-an-estimated-81-90-of) [2][3].

## The fix: finance the buyers instead of cutting prices

His fix was to finance AI startups and small cloud providers that could not afford its GPUs, keeping the surplus moving instead of forcing prices down [3][4].

Nvidia's filings show the machine's scale: $99 billion of investments and $36 billion of cloud-service commitments, arrangements that help AI cloud operators finance the GPUs they buy from Nvidia [1]. Kress pushed to rein in that circular financing, helped [cut a proposed OpenAI backstop from up to $250 billion to about $125 billion](https://theinference.org/article/nvidia-s-interim-ceo-balked-at-a-250-billion-openai-backstop-moving-the-bill-onto-oracle-s-70-billion), and was called "a deer in the headlights" for it [3][4].

## The market takes the short side

The claim found its crowd in hours. [Reddit](https://theinference.org/markets/companies/reddit)'s r/stocks thread drew 4,337 points and 647 comments by November 14 [5]. A Taiwan Stock Exchange [short-interest weekly dated November 13](https://www.smartkarma.com/insights/twse-short-interest-weekly-nov-13th-mediatek-global-unichip-tsmc-umc-nan-ya-plastics) put TSMC among its five highlighted names, inside a $41.7 billion aggregate short book [6].

The price had already moved. Taiwan's regulator cut the daily intraday short-selling limit from 30 percent to 3 percent, effective November 9 [7]. TSMC's New York shares closed Friday at $398.73, about 18 percent below October's high of $487.47, after a near-11 percent single-day fall on November 5 [8].

## The filings answer with bigger numbers

TSMC keeps posting the opposite of a demand problem. [October revenue was NT$586.89 billion](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/11/10/tsmcs-october-sales-.html), about $17.9 billion, up 59.7 percent from a year earlier: its biggest month on record, and roughly a third of its fourth-quarter guidance in a single month [7][9]. Quarterly revenue has more than doubled since late 2023 [10].

*Chart: **TSMC's quarterly revenue has more than doubled since late 2023** Line chart of TSMC quarterly revenue rising from about $20.4 billion in Q4 2023 to a record $46.9 billion in Q3 2026*

*Quarterly revenue, US$ billions, from TSMC's SEC filings. Every point is reported revenue, not guidance. Source: TSMC quarterly figures from its SEC filings. [10]*

Customers had prepaid NT$234.2 billion to hold capacity as of June 30, and the portion booked more than a year out had more than doubled to NT$92.4 billion [2]. The board had already approved up to $1 billion of stakes in [Anthropic](https://theinference.org/markets/companies/anthropic) and [OpenAI](https://theinference.org/markets/companies/openai), [as The Inference reported on November 10](https://theinference.org/article/tsmc-s-board-approved-up-to-1-billion-of-anthropic-and-openai-stakes-alongside-40-93-billion-of-capacity); what is new this week is the claim that part of the demand underneath those orders was Nvidia's own money [3][4][9].

## The same money turns up in Anthropic's IPO

Anthropic, the AI developer whose [IPO prospectus](https://www.tradingview.com/news/prnewswire:983c43b87b388:0-an-ai-developer-starts-its-ipo-roadshow-and-its-filing-names-chip-and-cloud-partners/) says the world's most advanced chip manufacturing sits "primarily at TSMC," prices its shares on November 18 and starts trading the next day [11][12]. Seven companies are buying $26 billion of its stock at the IPO price: Nvidia, [AMD](https://theinference.org/markets/companies/amd), [Broadcom](https://theinference.org/markets/companies/broadcom), Google, [Micron](https://theinference.org/markets/companies/micron), [Microsoft](https://theinference.org/markets/companies/microsoft) and TSMC's vehicle [11][12]. Nvidia, the company accused of manufacturing demand, is one of the seven, on top of $10 billion already invested in Anthropic [1].

*Chart: **Every TSMC growth reading in 2026 came in above the last** Column chart of TSMC year-over-year revenue growth readings across 2026, rising from the January outlook of about 30 percent to October's 59.7 percent*

*Year-over-year revenue growth as reported; the two outlook bars are company guidance. Sources: CNBC; Yahoo Finance/TIKR. [7][8]*

## Why the two stories have not collided

October counts wafers shipped and paid for [7]; the avalanche is a claim about orders not yet placed [3]. Nvidia was TSMC's largest customer in 2025, at 19 percent of revenue, or NT$727.0 billion, up from 12 percent a year earlier [2].

Nvidia's inventory has since more than quadrupled, to $31.6 billion [2]. The report says Nvidia has already contacted TSMC about winding down coming orders [3]; Taiwan's Commercial Times says custom-chip customers would take any capacity freed up, which TSMC has not confirmed [2]. What would settle the argument does not exist: no public number says how many wafers the Nvidia-funded clouds absorb, and the avalanche is one newspaper's account of one private meeting [2][3].

## The readings land within days

Nvidia reports on Tuesday November 17, Kress's first earnings call as interim chief, where the test is whether inventory and supply commitments keep climbing [1][2]. TSMC's November sales follow in early December; its mid-January fourth-quarter report brings the first 2027 outlook and the capital-expenditure budget [2][9].

The tell is capital expenditure: $60 billion to $64 billion held for 2026 says the order book is real, and a cut gives the avalanche a date [8]. Chief executive C.C. Wei says demand "is still far above our capability today to supply," while planning 2027 prudently [9]. Against that, TSMC's customers have NT$234.2 billion of prepayments already on the books [2].

*Chart: **TSMC's quarterly capex has more than doubled since late 2023** Column chart of TSMC quarterly capital expenditure rising from $5.5 billion in Q4 2023 to $13.9 billion in Q3 2026, with a peak of $15.8 billion in Q2 2026*

*Quarterly capital expenditure, US$ billions, from TSMC's SEC filings. The 2026 budget the story cites is $60 billion to $64 billion for the full year, which the company has held. Source: TSMC quarterly figures from its SEC filings. [13]*

## Takeaway

Nvidia paid its own customers to keep the wafers moving, and TSMC's record October does not yet prove that demand exists without it.

## Sources

1. [TechCrunch, "Nvidia's Jensen Huang resigns, chipmaker names CFO Colette Kress as interim CEO", 12 November 2026](https://techcrunch.com/2026/11/12/nvidias-jensen-huang-resigns-chipmaker-names-cfo-colette-kress-as-interim-ceo/)
2. [Yahoo Finance/TIKR, "TSMC Has a Problem if Huang 'Overcommitted to TSMC': Nvidia Was 19% of Its 2025 Sales", 13 November 2026](https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/tsmc-problem-huang-overcommitted-tsmc-145923460.html)
3. [Wccftech, "Instead Of Lowering GPU Prices, Former NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang Reportedly Financed AI Startups To Absorb Excess Silicon", 13 November 2026](https://wccftech.com/jensen-huang-financed-ai-startups-absorb-excess-silicon/)
4. [TechPowerUp, "NVIDIA Allegedly Engineered Scarcity By Funding AI Startups To Buy Its GPUs", 13 November 2026](https://www.techpowerup.com/354814/nvidia-allegedly-engineered-scarcity-by-funding-ai-startups-to-buy-its-gpus)
5. [Reddit r/stocks, "Instead Of Lowering GPU Prices, Former NVIDIA CEO Financed AI Startups To Absorb Excess Silicon", 14 November 2026](https://old.reddit.com/r/stocks/comments/1xw124v/instead_of_lowering_gpu_prices_former_nvidia_ceo/)
6. [Smartkarma/Shenton Research, "TWSE Short Interest Weekly (Nov 13th): MediaTek, Global Unichip, TSMC, UMC, Nan Ya Plastics", 14 November 2026](https://www.smartkarma.com/insights/twse-short-interest-weekly-nov-13th-mediatek-global-unichip-tsmc-umc-nan-ya-plastics)
7. [CNBC, "TSMC's October sales jump as global chip boom rolls on", 10 November 2026](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/11/10/tsmcs-october-sales-.html)
8. [Yahoo Finance/TIKR, "'Being Prudent': TSMC Stock Has Surged 41% in a Year. Is It Too Late to Buy?", 14 November 2026](https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/being-prudent-tsmc-stock-surged-223054275.html)
9. [Yahoo Finance/TIKR, "TSMC Just Booked a Record NT$587 Billion Month. Nvidia's November 17 Report Is the Next Test", 13 November 2026](https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/tsmc-just-booked-record-nt-153548103.html)
10. [TSMC, quarterly revenue from its SEC filings, retrieved 15 November 2026](https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0001046179)
11. [CNBC, "Anthropic sets IPO price range of $70 to $78, looks to start trading Nov. 19", 10 November 2026](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/11/10/anthropic-sets-price-range-of-70-to-78-in-upcoming-ipo.html)
12. [Equity Insider via TradingView/PRNewswire, "An AI Developer Starts Its IPO Roadshow, and Its Filing Names Chip and Cloud Partners", 11 November 2026](https://www.tradingview.com/news/prnewswire:983c43b87b388:0-an-ai-developer-starts-its-ipo-roadshow-and-its-filing-names-chip-and-cloud-partners/)
13. [TSMC, quarterly figures from its SEC filings, retrieved 15 November 2026](https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0001046179)


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Nvidia bankrolled its own GPU customers as an 'avalanche' of TSMC wafers loomed, WSJ reports — The Inference. Canonical: https://theinference.org/article/nvidia-bankrolled-its-own-gpu-customers-as-an-avalanche-of-tsmc-wafers-loomed-wsj-reports