Betting against Nvidia: why inference chips just got a $400M boost

general compute secured a $400m loan from upper90, using sambanova's sn50 inference chips as collateral to scale its ai cloud platform. this financing structure echoes early gpu-backed deals but targets open-source models running on efficient, non-nvidia hardware that claims to be 16x faster. the move signals a capital shift toward fragmenting nvidia's dominance as companies seek cheaper alternatives to frontier lab apis. providers avoiding vendor lock-in could gain an edge by offering lower total cost of ownership for inference workloads.