More than a chipmaker.

On November 11, while editorializing around Jensen Huang’s dramatic personal and professional denouement, I suggested the ambiguity his Icarus moment introduces into the AI ecosystem is far more concerning than the (admittedly myriad) Nvidia-specific questions his ouster raises.

Huang’s forced exit, I wrote, “casts a measure of doubt on the web of deals at the center of the global AI buildout.”

“A measure” was me being polite. In the very next sentence, I dropped the pretense to civility, writing that “Nvidia’s inked so many vendor-finance-style arrangements around the world that keeping track of them long since became an exercise in futility.”

With Huang’s official exit, those arrangements are likely to get fresh scrutiny as market participants grapple with the daunting prospect of tighter underwriting standards at what some jokingly call “The Bank of Nvidia.”

Start with $189.5 billion.

“In addition to losing Jensen’s skill, drive, connections, celebrity and political influence with Trump, the AI industry has lost Nvidia as a source of liquidity,” one reader remarked on Thursday. “I don’t know what [share] of industry liquidity is represented by Nvidia’s deep pockets,” the same reader went on, “but [it] also provided access to chips and a stamp of approval to its deals, which no one else can/will.”

Getting one’s mind around this requires establishing a definition of “liquidity,” which isn’t straightforward in any context, let alone this one. But a quick-pass tally based on public filings reflects nearly $190 billion of equity commitments, customer backstops, third-party leases and guarantees.

Another $29 billion.

When you add cloud purchases for the company’s own R&D, you’re up to nearly $220 billion.

Nvidia has a $99 billion investment portfolio too. Hold that thought. I’ll come back to it.

How the footprint grew.

The graphic gives you a sense of how Nvidia’s “liquidity provision” — or whatever you want to call it — has evolved.

We’ve gone from a disclosed $42 billion or so in January to $218.5 billion including Nvidia’s guarantee of up to $105 billion for lease and power payments in connection with OpenAI’s planned data-center campus in Ohio.

The stakes already held.

Coming back to the investment portfolio mentioned above, the graphic shows you the breakdown of Nvidia-held stakes in other companies and infrastructure financiers.

The public company investments include SpaceX, Intel and CoreWeave.

A $10 billion question.

Relatedly, Nvidia committed $10 billion to the private placement portion of Anthropic’s upcoming IPO. Other participants — e.g., AMD and Alphabet — could take up the slack should this week’s drama somehow impact Nvidia’s commitment, but that’s not the point. Rather, the fact that Nvidia’s planned $10 billion investment amounted to 38% of the total private placement speaks to the company’s Sasquatch-sized footprint in all things AI.

“Liquidity,” broadly speaking.

Again, there’s no set definition of “liquidity” in this context. And, importantly, there’s no universally accepted methodology for what should and shouldn’t be counted when it comes to tallying Nvidia’s overall financial support for the ecosystem at the center of which the company sits, and over which Jensen Huang presided.

The goal here was merely to conjure a broad snapshot of Nvidia’s disclosed investments, outstanding commitments and contingent financial support, inclusive of investments already made, mere pledges and everything in-between. It’s fair, I reckon, to describe that as “liquidity” provision.

As someone at Bloomberg put it Thursday, understating the case in what was otherwise an especially splashy attempt to wring this drama for every page view it’s worth, Jensen’s fall from grace “creates uncertainty for the broader AI sector.”

In the same coverage, the network quoted Ryuta Makino, a semi analyst at Gabelli Funds, who suggested it’ll be a while before he can take full stock of the fallout. “I am still assessing the impact,” Makino said. “But there will definitely be a ripple effect given a lot of this was propped up by Jensen himself.”