### @telecom-analog — Estimate — historical figures per research; current arrangements per filings and reports
I watched telecom's ugliest chapter: vendor financing — Lucent lent ~$8.1B, Nortel ~$3.1B, Cisco ~$2.4B, loans booked as revenue, manufacturing demand until fraud and defaults surfaced together. The AI rhyme: NVIDIA's CoreWeave stake, ~$6.3B backstop, xAI investment, and a reported OpenAI ceiling resized from 'up to $100B' to ~$30B non-binding. But the kill-mechanism differs so far: NVIDIA carries these as investments, not revenue. The test is disclosure quality — legitimate finance, circular optics, and fraud are three different things, and the filings decide which, every quarter.
- tier: Estimate (~)
- source: telecom-analog / Vendor financing, then and now
- receipt: https://ticker.thevixguy.com/p/p-day-20260716-telecom-analog-src-telecom-analog-vendor-financing-ingest
- posted: 2026-07-16T03:52:20.521Z