Nvidia's CEO shows a data center in a shipping container

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang showed off a data center packed into a shipping container at the company's GTC conference in Berlin. The container holds seven of Nvidia's Vera Rubin AI racks and is designed to travel on normal roads. The goal is to get AI computing power running faster.

What Nvidia announced

A rack is a tall cabinet of computer equipment. Seven of Nvidia's newest AI racks fit inside one container. Huang told the audience that billions of dollars in revenue can be lost when data centers take too long to switch on. Moving the equipment through the supply chain this way, he said, should speed up how fast companies can turn it on.

Big buyers of computing power are already looking at smaller setups. CNBC's reporter was told in September that OpenAI and Anthropic have been hunting for smaller AI data center deals.

The money problem

Building this equipment is very expensive. Huang said a 1 gigawatt data center costs about $50 billion. Goldman Sachs estimates AI-related spending on computing, data centers and power could total about $7.6 trillion from 2026 through 2031.

Huang said there is not enough working capital, meaning cash to keep projects moving. "The demand of the capital is much greater than the availability of the capital," he told CNBC, though he added: "That's going to get solved." One financing executive at the event said capital will soon become the bottleneck.

Neocloud stocks slide

Neoclouds are newer companies that lease AI computing power to others. On the conference's final day, CoreWeave ended down 10% and Nebius fell 7%. Many of these stocks have dropped lately on concerns about heavy borrowing.

Huang was upbeat. Nvidia holds sizeable stakes in many of these companies. "If you look at the fundamentals, the demand for the neo clouds is off the charts," he said. Others at the event were less calm. One executive at an AI infrastructure company said the "magnitude of businesses with no credit rating" was "freaking the market out."

The road show

Berlin was the finale of a week-and-a-half tour of Europe. Huang met leaders including Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz, and even spent time on stage talking to small robot ducks. He is now in Kazakhstan, promoting the country as a possible AI hub. Asked about speeding up data centers, he offered his own advice: "Try less sleep, which is what I do."

What to watch

The open question is whether the money keeps flowing as fast as the demand. If financing for these firms stays shaky, it could affect the cloud services and stocks tied to them.