Nvidia has quietly backed away from a new financing program that gave it a cut of AI cloud providers' rental income, a sign the chip giant is worried about antitrust scrutiny and investor nerves over debt.

• Nvidia pulled the plug on parts of the plan last week, less than two months after announcing it.
• Staff had flagged to customers that the deal could attract antitrust attention, since it let Nvidia influence how partners run their businesses.
• The program was meant to help small cloud firms borrow the billions needed to buy chips and build data centers, with Nvidia promising to rent unused GPU capacity itself.
• Under the terms, Nvidia would have taken half of any rental income above a set hourly break-even rate.
• Some partners were angered by the strings attached — Nvidia told them they could only rent chips to approved customers and preferred spreading capacity across several small AI firms.

Outlook: Nvidia says the July business model is still developing, and the program may return in reworked form or folded into another plan, but the company is also trimming its financial backing for OpenAI's big Ohio data center to keep debt worries in check.