Nvidia flags its $33.5B debt as a risk after a $25B bond sale

Nvidia’s latest quarterly filing names the company’s own borrowing as a risk factor. As of 26 July 2026, Nvidia had $33.5 billion in aggregate principal amount of senior notes outstanding, according to the 10-Q it filed with the SEC. Six months earlier that balance was less than a quarter of the size.

Almost all of it arrived at once. The filing says Nvidia issued $25.0 billion of senior unsecured notes across seven tranches in June 2026, for general corporate purposes. Long-term debt on the balance sheet moved from $7.5 billion in January to $32.4 billion in July, Nvidia’s results statement shows.

The shape of the obligation shifted too. Debt due in one to five years now stands at $15.0 billion. CNBC reported that the previous quarterly filing put that bucket at $2.75 billion, so the near-term repayment load grew by $12.25 billion in a single quarter.

Nvidia debt maturities, 26 July 2026	Amount
Due in one year	$1.0bn
Due in one to five years	$15.0bn
Due in five to ten years	$7.5bn
Due in more than ten years	$10.0bn
Net carrying amount	$33.4bn

Nvidia set out the consequence itself, in the risk factors section of the same document.

Maintenance of our indebtedness, contractual restrictions, and additional issuances of indebtedness could cause us to dedicate a substantial portion of our cash flows from operations towards debt service obligations and principal repayments.

Nvidia, Form 10-Q for the quarter ended 26 July 2026

That matters because of what sits beside it. The filing lists $366 billion of future commitments, of which $279 billion is supply and capacity, and $92 billion of that supply figure falls in the rest of fiscal 2027. TechCrunch reported the supply commitment stood at $119 billion a quarter earlier.

The counter-reading is that the business covers this without straining. Revenue reached $96.2 billion in the quarter, up 106% from a year earlier, with data centre sales of $89.0 billion. Gross margin held at 75.0%, and Nvidia returned roughly $26.0 billion to shareholders over the three months.

It also isn’t short of liquid assets. The balance sheet carries $22.4 billion of cash and equivalents plus $34.1 billion of marketable debt securities, which together exceed the debt. On that arithmetic the borrowing looks less like a company that needs the money and more like one that chose to raise it anyway.

What the debt does change is the argument about who’s funding whom. Business Insider reported that Nvidia has $18 billion committed to equity investments for the rest of this fiscal year, and held $47.9 billion in private companies as of late July. That’s more than double the $22.3 billion it held at the end of the last fiscal year.

So the company is borrowing in public markets while writing cheques into the private companies that buy its chips. It has extended that support in other forms too, as it did when it guaranteed $105 billion of OpenAI leases at an Ohio data centre. Chief financial officer Colette Kress rejected the circular financing charge on the earnings call, telling analysts “we see it differently” and arguing the risk is limited.

None of this dented the forecast, which is where most of the attention went when Nvidia projected 70% revenue growth for fiscal 2028. Guidance for the current quarter is $108.0 billion, plus or minus 2%, and it assumes no data centre compute revenue from China.

The line to watch is the commercial paper program. Nvidia has capacity to issue $25.0 billion of unsecured paper notes and had none outstanding on 26 July. If that changes, it’s the clearest signal that the buildout is running ahead of the cash the quarter throws off.