Nvidia’s Risky Business

英伟达的风险生意

On January 1, 1870, Jay Cooke, hailed as an American hero for his role in financing the Union effort in the Civil War, signed a contract that would, if you squint, lead to world war. In 1864, Congress had created the Northern Pacific Railway Company with the goal of linking the Great Lakes and Puget Sound with tracks that would eventually run from Duluth to Tacoma; the charter included 40 million acres of land adjacent to the proposed line in exchange for accomplishing the build-out. 1870年1月1日，杰伊·库克（Jay Cooke）——这位因在内战中为联邦政府筹资而被誉为美国英雄的人物——签署了一份合同。如果仔细审视，这份合同最终竟间接导致了世界大战。1864年，美国国会成立了北太平洋铁路公司，目标是将五大湖与普吉特海湾连接起来，修建一条从杜鲁斯通往塔科马的铁路；作为完成建设的交换条件，特许状中包含了铁路线旁4000万英亩的土地。

For the ensuing six years, however, Northern Pacific struggled to secure financing, even as the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads built towards each other, driving the golden spike linking Sacramento and Omaha in May 1869. Northern Pacific had approached Cooke about funding in 1866, but lacked the generous federal guarantees that undergirded Union Pacific and Central Pacific (which, it should be noted, led to an incredible amount of graft); Cooke, himself no stranger to the financial power of the federal government, wasn’t interested. 然而在接下来的六年里，北太平洋铁路公司在融资方面举步维艰，尽管当时联合太平洋铁路和中央太平洋铁路正在相向而行，并于1869年5月敲下了连接萨克拉门托和奥马哈的“金钉”。北太平洋铁路公司曾在1866年接触过库克寻求资金，但由于缺乏支撑联合太平洋和中央太平洋铁路的那种慷慨的联邦担保（值得注意的是，这种担保导致了惊人的贪腐），库克本人对联邦政府的金融力量并不陌生，因此他当时并无兴趣。

Ultimately, however, Northern Pacific gave him an offer he couldn’t resist: a commission of 12 percent on every bond, and $200 of Northern Pacific stock for every $1,000 in bonds he sold. Cooke soon found that his institutional peers agreed with his earlier refusal, and weren’t interested in his bonds, so he leaned on the same tactics he honed selling war bonds: appeals to patriotism, control of the media, and promises of railroad fortunes, backed by industrial-scale distribution. 最终，北太平洋铁路公司给出了一个让他无法拒绝的条件：每售出一份债券可获得12%的佣金，且每售出1000美元债券可获得200美元的北太平洋铁路股票。库克很快发现，他的机构同行们也和他当初一样拒绝了这些债券，于是他转而采用自己在销售战争债券时磨练出的策略：诉诸爱国主义、控制媒体、承诺铁路财富，并辅以工业规模的分销渠道。

At the peak Cooke employed 1,500 salespeople and funded 1,300 newspapers (through a combination of advertising and direct payments) with a brand burnished by the Civil War. Retail investors could already buy railway bonds; Cooke made them his primary funding mechanism. This was, to be certain, an incredible innovation. It used to be the case that if you couldn’t get loans from the government or from banks, you couldn’t get much money at all. 在鼎盛时期，库克雇佣了1500名销售人员，并通过广告和直接付款的方式资助了1300家报纸，利用内战时期建立的品牌声誉进行推广。当时散户投资者已经可以购买铁路债券，而库克将其变成了主要的融资机制。可以肯定的是，这是一项了不起的创新。过去的情况是，如果你无法从政府或银行获得贷款，你就几乎筹不到钱。

The problem was that Northern Pacific’s capital needs were endless, and by September 1873, as credit tightened worldwide thanks to a crash on the Vienna stock exchange and the demonetization of silver, Cooke, who had been funding Northern Pacific from deposits in between bond issuances, could find no more buyers. The subsequent bankruptcy of Jay Cooke & Company triggered the Panic of 1873, culminating in endless railroad bankruptcies across the country, a multi-year depression, multi-decade deflation, and, one could argue, the financial conditions that made Europe, four decades later, into a tinder box. 问题在于北太平洋铁路公司的资本需求是无底洞。到了1873年9月，由于维也纳证券交易所崩盘和白银非货币化导致全球信贷紧缩，一直利用债券发行间隙的存款来资助北太平洋铁路的库克，再也找不到买家了。随后杰伊·库克公司的破产引发了1873年大恐慌，导致全国范围内无数铁路公司破产、长达数年的经济萧条、长达数十年的通货紧缩，甚至可以说，这为四十年后欧洲成为“火药桶”埋下了金融伏笔。

Blowing Through Debt

债务狂飙

If this story sounds vaguely familiar it might be because Cooke is — for obvious reasons — a central character in Liaquat Ahamed’s new book, 1873, released earlier this year. Ahamed is not shy about drawing a link between the collapse of the railroad buildout and the current AI moment; the book’s very first page — even before page 1 — is about translating sums of money, and concludes thusly: 如果这个故事听起来有些耳熟，那可能是因为库克是利亚卡特·阿哈迈德（Liaquat Ahamed）今年早些时候出版的新书《1873》中的核心人物。阿哈迈德毫不避讳地将当年的铁路建设崩溃与当前的AI浪潮联系起来；该书在正文第一页之前，专门讨论了货币金额的换算，并得出结论：

“In order to grasp the true significance of sums of money that relate to the economic situation of whole countries — such as the size of the indemnity imposed on France after the Franco-Prussian war — it is most useful not simply to make allowances for changes in the cost of living but instead to adjust for changes in the size of economies. To translate such figures into comparable 2026 magnitudes, multiply by a factor of 1,200. Thus the $500 million that went into U.S. railway bonds annually during the boom years of the early 1870s would today be the equivalent of $600 billion, roughly what is projected to be invested by major tech companies in 2026.” “为了理解与整个国家经济状况相关的资金数额的真正意义——例如普法战争后对法国征收的赔款规模——最有用的方法不仅仅是考虑生活成本的变化，而是根据经济规模的变化进行调整。要将这些数字换算成2026年的可比量级，需要乘以1200的系数。因此，19世纪70年代初繁荣时期每年投入美国铁路债券的5亿美元，相当于今天的6000亿美元，这大致相当于2026年大型科技公司预计的投资额。”

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is certainly aware of the connection: he cited 1873 as “the book to be read” on the company’s recent earnings call. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence, then, that Microsoft, alone amongst the hyperscalers, still boasts substantial free cash flow — $19.6 billion last quarter. Microsoft is the one hyperscaler still abiding by the dictum used to deny the existence of a bubble: its CapEx isn’t funded by debt. 微软首席执行官萨提亚·纳德拉（Satya Nadella）显然意识到了这种联系：他在公司最近的财报电话会议上称《1873》是“必读书目”。或许这并非巧合，微软是唯一一家仍拥有巨额自由现金流（上季度为196亿美元）的超大规模云厂商。微软是唯一一家仍遵循“反泡沫”准则的巨头：其资本支出（CapEx）并非由债务支撑。

This was, believe it or not, a defense that could be used for nearly all of Big Tech a year ago; then, between September and November, Oracle, Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon issued a combined $80 billion in debt for building out infrastructure. That was only the beginning: after raising a combined $108 billion in all of 2025, these four companies have, as of July 7, already raised $194 billion this year. Unsurprisingly, spreads are rising, and 86% of the bonds issued this year are already trading at higher yields than at issuance. Cover for recent issuance has fallen to less than 2x, from 5x in February. 信不信由你，一年前这几乎是所有大型科技公司都能用来辩护的理由；然而，在去年9月到11月之间，甲骨文、Meta、Alphabet和亚马逊总共发行了800亿美元的债务用于基础设施建设。这仅仅是个开始：在2025年全年总共筹集1080亿美元后，截至7月7日，这四家公司今年已经筹集了1940亿美元。不出所料，利差正在扩大，今年发行的债券中，86%的交易收益率已经高于发行时。近期发行的债券认购倍数已从2月份的5倍降至不足2倍。

The real shock, however, came at the beginning of June, when Google announced it would raise $85 billion in equity, including a special $10 billion issuance to the aforementioned Berkshire Hathaway. I wrote at the time in The Google Capital Company: It is worth noting that $10 billion is a relatively small amount of money to both companies. To that end, perhaps the primary utility is as a signaling mechanism. On Google’s side, the signal is that the expected demand is actually far greater than anyone thinks, and that the company is ready and willing to fund supply using all means at its disposal, including equity; for them Berkshire Hathaway’s investment is an endorsement of this view and a validation of the wisdom of the investment. And, on the flip side, if the signal is correct, then Berkshire Hathaway… 然而，真正的冲击发生在6月初，当时谷歌宣布将通过股权融资筹集850亿美元，其中包括向上述伯克希尔·哈撒韦公司定向增发的100亿美元。我当时在《谷歌资本公司》一文中写道：值得注意的是，对于这两家公司来说，100亿美元都是相对较小的金额。因此，其主要用途或许是一种信号机制。对谷歌而言，这个信号表明预期的需求实际上远超所有人的想象，且公司已准备好并愿意动用一切手段（包括股权）来资助供应；对他们来说，伯克希尔·哈撒韦的投资是对这一观点的背书，也是对其投资智慧的验证。反过来说，如果这个信号是正确的，那么伯克希尔·哈撒韦……