Nvidia has suspended a financing arrangement that would have given the company a share of revenue from artificial intelligence cloud providers, according to a Thursday report from The Wall Street Journal.

NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA)

The initiative, introduced fewer than eight weeks ago, was designed to help smaller AI cloud companies secure funding to buy Nvidia semiconductor products. In exchange, Nvidia would have received a percentage of the cloud earnings generated by those chips.

The Journal said Nvidia withdrew from the arrangements last week. The chipmaker may later restructure the initiative or fold it into another offering.

The development comes only about eight weeks after Nvidia introduced the program, underscoring how quickly the company is still refining new ways to finance AI infrastructure demand while facing closer attention from customers and regulators. Nvidia shares (NVDA) held near their recent trading range when the report surfaced late Thursday.

Program Structure and Mechanics

Under the proposed model, Nvidia would sell processors to cloud customers and then lease back any unused computing capacity if those customers could not sell it independently. The structure was intended to give cloud companies a guaranteed buyer and make it easier for them to finance chip purchases.

Nvidia would have benefited both from the initial sale of hardware and from receiving half of cloud revenue generated by Nvidia-equipped infrastructure above a set benchmark.

During this week’s earnings discussion, Nvidia said the framework had the potential to generate revenue in the billions over the medium and long term.

Even so, the program faced resistance from the start. According to the report, Nvidia told cloud providers they could lease processors only to approved clients. The company also pushed for capacity to be spread across several smaller companies rather than concentrated with a single large customer. Some prospective partners resisted that level of oversight.

Internal Regulatory Warnings

Several Nvidia employees warned existing and prospective clients that the program could draw regulatory antitrust scrutiny. The Journal highlighted the sensitive question of how much control a chipmaker can exert over the operations of its customers.

Investor scrutiny has increased as Nvidia expands its financial role across the artificial intelligence industry, where access to compute has become as strategically important as the chips themselves. Critics have raised concerns that self-referential transactions could artificially boost demand for Nvidia semiconductors.

Earlier this month, Nvidia helped arrange $500 billion in credit from major U.S. financial institutions for its customers. The company also committed to back up to $105 billion to help OpenAI lease a large data facility.

An Nvidia spokesperson said: “The new business model that opens up compute access to the fast-growing AI ecosystem is still in place and continues to evolve due to high demand.”

The Journal said its reporting was based on people familiar with the matter. Nvidia has not publicly acknowledged the suspension beyond that statement.