Nvidia is invincible. Unless it isn't.

The doubters are coming for the world's most valuable company.

- By SHAWN TULLY

IN LATE OCTOBER, Nvidia cofounder and CEO Jensen Huang took the stage at the company's annual GTC conference to make a typically sweeping declaration.

Nvidia, he pronounced, sits “at the epicenter of the largest industrial revolution in human history,” eclipsing the advent of the steam engine and electricity.

He went on to unveil a stunning array of partnerships: Nvidia plans to build 100,000 driverless cars alongside Uber and join Palantir to supply software and chips to accelerate the transfer of products from warehouses to doorsteps; it has also hatched a blueprint showing “hyperscalers” how to build “AI factories,” giga-scale data centers that only operate at their most potent and efficient deploying, guess what, Nvidia systems.

Huang’s speech so pumped Nvidia fans that they sent its market cap soaring 5%, a one-day, $250 billion jump that’s 60% bigger than Boeing’s entire worth. The move made Nvidia the world’s first company to touch a $5 trillion valuation. According to MarketBeat, 46 out of 47 analysts have a “strong buy” or “buy” rating on Nvidia stock.

A small chorus of extremely insightful skeptics, however, aren’t so sure everything is quite as rosy as Huang and investors seem to believe. Their worries coalesce around how Nvidia is striving to maintain its supremacy, by assembling what we’ve never seen before on this scale: a complex superstructure encompassing investments and financing for its own customers designed to boost and perpetuate demand for its own products. The strategy—centered mainly on OpenAI and “neocloud” CoreWeave—is as much about financial engineering as accelerated compute engineering.