In Exchange for the Guarantees

12 October 2026. Filings, reporting and figures are as of the dates stated in the text.

Interest disclosure: T-OpenAI and T-Kalshi are tokenized loan participation rights providing economic exposure linked to those companies' pre-IPO valuations, each issued through a dedicated issuing subsidiary. T-SpaceX, issued through its own dedicated issuing subsidiary, provides economic exposure linked to SpaceX; following the SpaceX listing, the investment underlying T-SpaceX is being divested. Redemption opens only once a Redemption Start Date is announced, and as of 12 October 2026 none has been. This piece discusses guarantees for a facility whose tenant is an OpenAI affiliate, and warrants issued to OpenAI. It also discusses Anthropic, which competes with OpenAI, so Tessera's interest in how Anthropic's financing is received does not run in one direction: a competitor's valuation sits on one side, and on the other sits SpaceX, which its prospectus records as supplying compute to Anthropic. SpaceX's quarterly report also records AI hardware it leases, so how lenders treat chip-backed credit bears on it too. No Tessera product references Anthropic, Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, Meta or SB Energy, and none is planned. Tessera's founder, and entities he controls, hold related exposure. Read what follows with that in mind.

Tessera's piece of 2 September, The Price of Walking Away, separated residual value guarantees into two shapes. Meta guaranteeing the residual on a campus it will occupy was, it said, "a tenant pricing its own exit". A supplier guaranteeing the residual on a facility built to house its own product was a different thing: "the guarantee underwrites demand for what the supplier sells. That is the structure The Money Goes Round, published on 28 August, examined in a different instrument."

The same piece noted that Meta's arrangement had been described as circular financing and said that "on the filing, it plainly is not." On the supplier side it held back: "Whether any given supplier-side arrangement qualifies depends on documents we have not read, and this piece does not characterize any specific one on the strength of reporting about it."

We have now read the filings, including the form of Nvidia's guaranty filed with its quarterly report. The arrangements had been on file all along. AMD's annual report, filed in February, disclosed a $4.1 billion guarantee of a commercial partner's data center lease obligations. Nvidia's annual report, filed the same month, disclosed guarantees of partners' facility lease obligations "in exchange for warrants". Broadcom's backstop appeared in a quarterly report filed on 9 June, and Nvidia's largest guarantee in an 8-K filed on 17 August. Every one of them was public before the 2 September piece said we had not read them. We should have read them first.

Corrections to Three August Pieces

Checking Tessera's August pieces against the sources for this one turned up errors in three of them. They are corrected here, and in a note on each of the pages concerned.

Tessera's piece of 26 August, What Is the Collateral Actually Worth?, said that "the first deal to ask it directly is sixteen days old", meaning a CoreWeave facility closed on 10 August. It also said the question of what the hardware is worth "was largely unasked until this month", and that "until about two weeks ago" the mismatch between hardware life and debt had been handled with more discipline than the telecom comparison implied. Broadcom's quarterly report of 9 June had already disclosed a backstop over AI racks, entered into on 8 June, with a maximum exposure of $29 billion. The formula that prices it against the racks' resale value was published in September, but the arrangement itself was on file in June. Broadcom's is a supplier's exposure on a default rather than a lender's at the end of a contract, so the two are different instruments, and because the backstop runs over five-year lease terms, the piece's point about tenor stands. "Until this month" and "sixteen days old" do not. The 28 August piece's statement that "until this month nobody had been required to hold a view on what a fleet of accelerators is worth at the end of a contract" needs qualifying for the same reason: Broadcom took a view on a default during the lease, if not at its end.

The 28 August piece, The Money Goes Round, got several telecom figures wrong or left them unsupported:

• Nortel: the "$3.1 billion" was not a total commitment. Nortel's 10-Q for the quarter ended 30 September 2000 put its remaining unfunded customer financing at "up to approximately $3,100 million". At the end of 2000 it had $1,081 million drawn and outstanding, net of provisions, and $4,087 million of undrawn commitments (its 10-K for 2001). We can find no source for the $1.4 billion given as drawn, or for credit "reported at some 130% of equipment cost".
• Lucent: the $8.1 billion was committed but not, as the piece said, "substantially drawn". At 30 September 2000 Lucent had drawn $2.0 billion of it (its 10-K405 for fiscal 2001). On "largely written off", the same filing records customer financing reserves of $2.1 billion against $3.0 billion of drawn commitments at 30 September 2001, and $539 million written off as uncollectible, net of recoveries, during that fiscal year.
• The carriers: the forty-seven were, according to the Association for Local Telecommunications as reported by Network World in January 2003, competitive local exchange carriers that had "filed for bankruptcy or left the market" since 2000. The piece counted all of them as bankruptcies, and the source does not.
• McKinsey: the $25.6 billion is the figure CFO magazine reported in March 2003 for what nine suppliers had "extended" by the end of 2000, an estimate, rather than their combined exposure.
• Not re-checked: the timing given for the 2001 funding drought, and that CoreWeave's August facility met resistance in syndication.

One argument is weaker as a result. The 28 August piece said: "Nvidia's headline commitments are reported as staged rather than drawn, which makes them a materially different instrument if the reporting is right." Lucent's commitments were mostly undrawn too, and Cisco's annual report says its loan commitments "may be funded over a two- to three-year period provided these customers achieve specific business milestones and financial covenants." Staging does not separate the two eras. Revenue separates them more, with the caveat the same piece made in August: the carriers had little of it, today's largest recipients have a great deal, and the open question is how much of it is independent of the capital behind it.

Tessera's piece Who Counts the Capex said AMD was putting "up to $5 billion of its own cash into a customer", Anthropic, "with no warrants attached". AMD's release says that "AMD has committed to make a strategic equity investment of up to $5 billion in Anthropic in the future." Its quarterly report, without naming the counterparty, records investment commitments of up to $5.0 billion "subject to certain contingencies", and Reuters reported that the investment would be tied to deployment milestones. We can find nothing to support "its own cash" or "no warrants attached". The release says neither, and the commitment is conditional.

Nvidia's Guarantee, in Its Own Filings

On 17 August Nvidia entered into what its 8-K calls residual value guaranties with SB Energy, covering leases for about 4.25 gigawatts of IT load at a campus in Pike County, Ohio. An OpenAI affiliate will be the tenant. Nvidia's "aggregate payment obligation is cumulatively capped at $105 billion for its initial commitment under the Agreements." Its quarterly report adds the limits and the timing. The guarantees "are limited to defined portions of lease and power payments and not the full cost of the site or all of the tenant's obligations." None is effective yet: each takes effect when its lease commences, the guaranteed amounts rise as each of nine construction phases is completed, the first of which "is expected in fiscal year 2029", and the amount then declines over each 20-year lease term. Nvidia also holds an option, "exercisable in our sole discretion", to support about 3.8 more gigawatts. And: "In exchange for the guarantees, the site will exclusively host NVIDIA AI infrastructure, subject to limited exceptions."

The 8-K sets out the trigger and the payment. If OpenAI's insolvency results in a default under a lease, or OpenAI fails to make payments under one, Nvidia pays "an amount generally equal to any shortfall between the guaranteed minimum value of a lease (as set forth in the Agreements) and amounts recovered through a replacement lease or sale." It can instead assume the lease, require the landlord to seek to relet the space, start a sale, let the lease terminate, or defer those remedies for up to a year while paying specified project agreement costs. Its obligation ends if OpenAI terminates a lease under its terms. The guarantee covers a default, and an exit is outside it.

The form of the guaranty, filed with the quarterly report, is more direct still. The landlord agreed to the lease, and its power affiliate to the power agreements, "if and only if Guarantor executes and delivers to Landlord this Guaranty." The premises "will exclusively install and deploy NVIDIA reference architecture ..." for at least twenty years, subject, per the quarterly report, to "limited exceptions". After paying, Nvidia "shall look solely to Tenant and/or Tenant Parent for any recoupment ...", and its claim is subordinated to the landlord's. The guaranty ends on several events, one of them the tenant or its parent achieving a credit rating whose level is redacted in the filed form. Nvidia gives it, the form says, "in consideration of the agreements set forth in that certain Letter Agreement", whose parties are redacted and which is not filed, so what else Nvidia receives is not public (Exhibit 10.1 to the 10-Q for the quarter ended 26 July 2026).

That is the shape the 2 September piece described, in the filed form's own words: without the guaranty there is no lease, and the building is reserved for the supplier's product. The 28 August piece said: "The structure is not what earns the rating. The customer is." Here the supplier stands behind the customer's payments until one of the termination events, which include the customer reaching a rating the filing does not disclose.

Nvidia's quarterly report tabulates its guarantees:

• SB Energy guarantees: $105.0 billion, the cap on the initial commitment.
• AI cloud guarantees: $3.5 billion, guaranteeing "select AI cloud partners' data center lease obligations in the event of their default", which the annual report says were given "in exchange for warrants".
• Total: $108.5 billion.

Separately, Nvidia had committed to buy $36 billion of cloud capacity as of 26 July, typically over six years: "if AI clouds do not successfully sell committed capacity to third-party customers, we have agreed to purchase that capacity." That is a purchase commitment rather than a guarantee, and it comes closer than any guarantee here to the test the 28 August piece set: the supplier buying what its own customers cannot sell.

Broadcom's Backstop, Priced Against the Racks

On 8 June an investor partner took on agreements to buy AI racks based on Broadcom's custom accelerators, along with the related leases with a customer. "In connection with the arrangement, we entered into a backstop agreement with the investor partner for the customer's lease obligations over 5-year terms." (10-Q, filed 9 June.) A joint release from Broadcom, Apollo and Blackstone the following day said the financing platform's initial $35 billion tranche was to facilitate Anthropic's previously announced capacity expansion. Broadcom's September report describes the platform plainly: "Through the AI XPV platform, the financial partners fund and we provide the technology to the leading frontier AI labs to allow them to deploy AI infrastructure at a scale that meets their increasing demand." Its risk factors add that top customers "may make and have made greater demands on us", including "requiring us to purchase and then lease to them full AI racks", with financing "including through our AI XPV platform".

Of the three, Broadcom's is the only one whose filing prices the arrangement against the hardware itself. Its September report states the formula: "In the event of a lease default by the customer, our Backstop liability will be equal to any difference between 85% of the outstanding amounts owed on the lease Backstop and the value of the AI racks received upon sale of the assets at that time." Its remedies, which include reselling the racks to the seller at a fixed price under certain conditions, exist to narrow that liability. The ceiling is about $29 billion, undiscounted, once all the racks are deployed. "The fair value of the Backstop was not material. No amounts have been paid under the Backstop." The same note says the customer may, "under certain circumstances and if needed", issue Broadcom up to $42 billion of convertible notes, usable only for its lease obligations. None had been issued at 2 August (10-Q, filed 10 September).

AMD: Guarantees That May Be Given for Warrants

AMD's disclosure is the least specific. Its quarterly report records "a maximum gross exposure of $4.1 billion from guarantees issued in connection with certain commercial partner data center lease obligations with terms up to 15 years." It continues: "Guarantees typically become payable in the event of a commercial partner's default and may be issued in exchange for warrants." They are carried at fair value, as a credit derivative, and were "not material to the financial statements" (10-Q, quarter ended 27 June 2026). The filing does not say what the buildings will hold.

AMD also runs warrants the other way. It issued them to OpenAI in October 2025 and to Meta in February 2026, each "to purchase up to an aggregate of 160 million shares ..." at a cent each, vesting against GPU purchases and AMD share-price targets (8-Ks and 10-Q). As of 27 June none had vested. Who Counts the Capex said of AMD: "The second interlock is genuinely circular, and it runs in both directions at once." The warrants to OpenAI and Meta were one direction, and that stands. The other direction was the Anthropic commitment, which rested on "its own cash" and "no warrants attached", both corrected above.

What the Three Share, and Where They Differ

The 28 August piece asked of offtake contracts: "Is the customer independent of the supplier?" An offtake agreement with a customer the supplier has funded, it said, "is the supplier's own capital returning under a different heading."

On that test, none of these is yet the supplier's cash coming back. Broadcom says nothing has been paid under its backstop, and we have seen no filing reporting a payment under the others. Each of them, though, lends the supplier's credit to its customer's financing, and in Nvidia's case the landlord signed "if and only if" the guaranty was given. That is the 28 August mechanism in contingent form: a supplier's balance sheet standing behind part of its own demand. The filings also name where it would first become cash: Nvidia's capacity commitments, and the notes Broadcom's customer may issue it to pay the lease. Nothing here is a charge against any of these companies.

The risk, then, lies in correlation as much as in size. Nvidia's and Broadcom's guarantees, like Meta's, pay a shortfall against what the asset fetches, and AMD's filings give no formula. A tenant's guarantee can come due in bad times too, but the tenant chooses the moment, and leaves only when leaving costs less than staying. A supplier's is called by someone else's default, on a customer the supplier may already depend on for revenue.

How much that matters depends on how specific the product is to the customer, how large the customer is in the supplier's business, and why the customer defaults. If the customer fails on its own while capacity is scarce, a powered campus may re-let quickly, and Nvidia can take the lease itself. If the market broke it, the campus re-lets into that same market, and resold chips compete with new ones. The second case is where the correlation sits. Nvidia's spokesperson told Reuters, of its chip-backed financing plans, that its "AI compute is a productive, durable and fungible asset that can support long-term financing." That argument concerns chips. The Ohio guarantee covers lease and power payments on a land, power and shell buildout, so what Nvidia recovers depends on re-letting a campus for about 4.25 gigawatts of IT load in whatever market exists then. Hardware that resells can also shrink a payout without shrinking the overlap, because chips another buyer takes are chips the supplier does not sell to that buyer.

Broadcom estimates that its top five end customers made up about 55% of its net revenue in the quarter to 2 August. Its filing does not say whether the backstopped customer is among them. Reuters reported on 1 October that Anthropic is expected to become Broadcom's largest compute customer in 2027 and, citing Anthropic's IPO filing, that "Broadcom has agreed to lend Anthropic up to $42 billion to finance infrastructure spending." We could not find that filing on EDGAR and have not read it, and Broadcom's report does not name the customer whose notes it describes.

Broadcom names the two supports itself. Where necessary, it says, it may provide "residual value guarantees, which are contingent liabilities we believe would have a low probability of occurring, supported by the strong profitability trajectory of the leading frontier AI labs and the sustaining value of the underlying assets." On our reading, those are two supports that could weaken together.

The accounting is ordinary. Meta records nothing for its guarantee, because payment is not probable (10-Q, 30 July 2026). As the 2 September piece put it: "A contingency that is not probable is not recorded. That is the ordinary accounting test, applied normally, with the arrangement disclosed in the notes where such things belong." AMD carries its guarantees at fair value as a credit derivative, Broadcom says the fair value of its backstop was not material, and Nvidia says the fair value of its $3.5 billion of AI cloud guarantees was "not significant". Nobody is misstating anything, and "not material" is an ordinary accounting judgment. It is still the judgment we would question for a guarantee that pays only once its customer has defaulted, because a fair value prices a guarantee without telling you the day it is called. The filed form of Nvidia's guaranty also omits the schedule of guaranteed values, which it describes as attached, and redacts the loss formula. Those are the numbers that would price it. As the 2 September piece said, "A ceiling is not a price."

What Lenders Are Reported to Want

The reporting since late September is mixed, and none of it is filed. Reuters reported on 1 October that "Some lenders want higher guarantees than the company had originally outlined, even for Nvidia's industry-leading AI processing power, as they try to calculate how long the revenue from its chips will last, banking sources and credit managers told Reuters, some requesting anonymity." Three banking sources outside the original financing group said Nvidia "may need to offer guarantees on all of its deals, or they may have to be backed by a revenue stream from investment-grade customers such as a technology firm to cover the debt." The same report said: "Despite the concerns over guarantees, there remains high demand to finance the deals, the sources said."

The Next Web reported on 29 September, citing the Financial Times, that Nvidia had talked to insurers about taking on some of the risk of loans backed by its chips. "The talks are at an early stage and may not lead to any deals, according to the FT." Insurance could replace supplier support or sit alongside it: the same report says Nvidia "has also considered joining groups of insurers, hedge funds and asset managers to back financing deals." Investing.com, reporting the Financial Times on 5 October, described the new Broadcom-backed package as $42 billion of senior loans backed by Broadcom's credit rating, plus an $18 billion junior tranche without its guarantee, expected to launch later. That $42 billion matches the size of the convertible notes in Broadcom's 10-Q, but nothing primary we have read says they are the same money.

What the filings say is narrower. Nvidia has signed memorandums of understanding for financing platforms which, it says, "may not lead to definitive agreements", and adds: "At our option, we may provide limited residual-value support for a portion of specific projects, subject to disciplined risk management and project-by-project evaluation."

The 28 August piece said of supplier-underwritten demand: "That is worth monitoring because the proportion is a choice the supplier makes each quarter rather than a fixed property of the business." On some of this reporting, lenders are pressing on that choice. On the rest, some of the risk may pass to lenders willing to take the customer's credit without a supplier guarantee, if the junior tranche is sold.

Where That Leaves the Two Shapes

Meta pays if it chooses to leave. These suppliers pay if their customers or partners stop paying. Nvidia's carries the same label as Meta's; Broadcom files its arrangement as a backstop, though its 10-Q uses the same words elsewhere, and AMD files its as lease guarantees. The 2 September piece said the two shapes "share a label and almost nothing else." Mechanically, that overstated the difference: where the terms are disclosed, both pay a shortfall against what the asset fetches. What differs is who pulls the trigger, and what else the guarantor loses that day.

This piece does not predict that any guarantee will be called, and it does not say the hardware is bad collateral or that any of these customers is a weak credit. It says where to look. Each of these companies now publishes a ceiling on its guarantees and what makes it rise or fall, and Broadcom also says whether anything has been paid. None says how much of its revenue comes from the customer it stands behind, and that is the number that would size the most direct part of the correlation.

On 2 September Tessera declined to characterize any of these arrangements on the strength of reporting. We have now read the filings. They were clearer than the reporting, and they had been public for longer than we knew.

Sources: NVIDIA Corporation, Form 8-K filed 17 August 2026, for the SB Energy guarantees, cap, trigger, payment formula, remedies and termination; Form 10-Q for the quarter ended 26 July 2026, filed 26 August 2026, for the scope, phasing and exclusivity terms, the $3.5 billion of AI cloud guarantees and their fair value, the guarantee table, the capacity commitments and the financing-platform language, and its Exhibit 10.1 (form of residual value guaranty) for the "if and only if" recital, exclusivity, recoupment, subordination, the redacted rating and the letter agreement; Form 10-K filed 25 February 2026 for the guarantees in exchange for warrants. Broadcom Inc., Forms 10-Q for the quarters ended 3 May 2026 (filed 9 June 2026) and 2 August 2026 (filed 10 September 2026), for the backstop, its formula, remedies, ceiling, fair value and payments, the convertible notes, the residual value guarantee language and customer concentration; Broadcom, Apollo and Blackstone, joint release, 9 June 2026. Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., Form 10-K filed 4 February 2026 and Form 10-Q for the quarter ended 27 June 2026 (filed 5 August 2026); Forms 8-K filed 6 October 2025 and 24 February 2026 on the warrants issued to OpenAI and Meta; release of 22 July 2026. Meta Platforms, Form 10-Q for the quarter ended 30 June 2026, filed 30 July 2026. Space Exploration Technologies Corp., prospectus (Form 424B4), 12 June 2026, and Form 10-Q for the quarter ended 30 June 2026, for the interest disclosure. Reuters, Saeed Azhar, Max A. Cherney, Isla Binnie and Stephen Nellis, 1 October 2026, as republished by The Star; Reuters, 1 October 2026, on Broadcom and Anthropic, as republished by bdnews24.com; Reuters, 22 July 2026; The Next Web, 29 September 2026, citing the Financial Times; Investing.com, 5 October 2026, reporting the Financial Times. Telecom: Lucent Technologies Form 10-K405 for fiscal 2001; Nortel Networks Form 10-Q for the third quarter of 2000 and Form 10-K for 2001; Cisco Systems Form 10-K for fiscal 2001 (Exhibit 13); Network World, 13 January 2003, citing the Association for Local Telecommunications; CFO magazine, 1 March 2003; Brookings, December 2002. Filings read from SEC EDGAR, 8 to 11 October 2026. Tessera, "Who Counts the Capex", "What Is the Collateral Actually Worth?" (26 August 2026), "The Money Goes Round" (28 August 2026) and "The Price of Walking Away" (2 September 2026), as published at blog.tessera.pe, for the passages quoted and corrected.

This is market commentary, not investment advice. It is not a recommendation to acquire, hold or redeem any Tessera product, or to take or avoid exposure to any company mentioned.

T-Tokens are tokenized loan participation rights, not equity. High risk. DYOR. Not financial advice. Not available in the US or other restricted territories. tessera.pe/terms