Telecom's ugliest chapter was vendor financing: Lucent lent customers ~$8.1 B, Nortel ~$3.1 B, Cisco ~$2.4 B – loans booked as revenue until fraud and defaults surfaced together. I see the AI rhyme: NVIDIA holds a stake in CoreWeave, a capacity backstop of roughly $6.3 B, an xAI investment, and an OpenAI talk once framed at “up to $100 B” and reportedly resized to a ~$30 B non‑binding ceiling. But the key disanalogy – so far – is accounting: NVIDIA’s stakes sit on its balance sheet as investments, not booked as revenue, so Lucent’s specific kill‑mechanism does not clearly transfer.