Are $200B of Nvidia GPUs Really Sitting in Warehouses?

SemiFunctional Tech · November 2, 2026

Nvidia is facing a pointed accusation from one of the AI boom's loudest skeptics. On a recent episode of the Prof G Markets podcast, Ed Zitron, who writes the Where's Your Ed At? newsletter, claimed that "at least 200 billion dollars worth" of Nvidia chips are sitting idle in warehouses. His explanation: Nvidia is channel stuffing, pressuring partners to accept deliveries they don't need by tying those shipments to access to its upcoming Vera Rubin systems.

Zitron didn't cite a source for the number on the show. But in September he estimated that $200 billion to $300 billion of AI chips industry-wide could be sitting in warehouses or in data centers without power. That makes the figure an estimate across the whole sector, not a measured count of Nvidia inventory.

He has pushed the argument further elsewhere. In an appearance on Yahoo Finance's The 8:30, Zitron argued that the GPU shortage is one Jensen Huang created himself. He also pointed to customer concentration: about 70% of Nvidia's accounts receivable in the first half of the year came from just five companies, a risk investor Steve Eisman has also flagged.

The receivables are growing

Channel stuffing tends to show up as customers taking longer to pay, and Zitron himself pointed to Nvidia's swelling receivables. A TIKR analysis published on Yahoo Finance checked that claim against Nvidia's financials. Through fiscal 2026 (ended January), receivables and revenue grew almost in lockstep: receivables climbed 67% to $38.5 billion while revenue rose 65% to $215.9 billion.

The most recent reported quarter broke that pattern. According to Nvidia's quarterly filing, receivables had jumped to $63.1 billion as of July 26, and days sales outstanding stretched from 45 to 60. Free cash flow fell to $21.3 billion from $48.6 billion the prior quarter, even as net income came in at $59.7 billion. Nvidia's CFO commentary attributes the shift to longer payment terms on large, multi-quarter deals with certain investment-grade customers.

Amazon shows some chips really are idle

The strongest real-world support for Zitron's concern comes from Amazon. Business Insider reported that some of the Nvidia server racks Amazon has bought are sitting in warehouses because its data centers don't have enough power to run them. Internal emails reportedly showed Amazon expecting about $5 billion of Nvidia AI systems in August and roughly $3 billion a month after that. Amazon even set up an "Early Rack Receipt" program to take ownership of hardware before it reaches a data center.

Amazon called staging hardware near deployment sites standard practice and pushed back on suggestions that AWS lacks a deployment plan. The key distinction is the reason: these racks are reportedly waiting on electricity, not sitting unwanted. That points to a power bottleneck rather than proof that Nvidia is forcing chips on customers who don't need them. Morgan Stanley has warned of a 32-gigawatt power shortfall for U.S. data centers through 2028.

Buyers say they're short on compute

The companies writing those checks describe demand, not a glut. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai recently rejected comparisons to the dot-com era's unused "dark fiber," saying Google is capacity-constrained every day. Elon Musk also posted that SpaceX struggled to rent inference compute from AWS, Google Cloud, or anyone else. If $200 billion in GPUs were simply surplus, renting some out would seem like an easy win.

Wall Street isn't pricing in a slowdown either. Consensus estimates have Nvidia's revenue nearly doubling to about $412 billion in the fiscal year ending January 2027, with projections reaching $903 billion two years later.

The risk worth watching

That doesn't mean the concern is baseless. Citadel CEO Ken Griffin has compared the current AI build-out to the 2000 fiber bubble and warned that GPU pricing could collapse if supply ever outruns demand. Idle racks waiting on power, longer payment terms, and a handful of customers holding most of Nvidia's receivables are all pressure points if demand ever cools.

The bottom line: there's no hard evidence that $200 billion of Nvidia chips are sitting unwanted, but some hardware is clearly idle while it waits on power, and Nvidia is waiting longer to get paid. Nvidia reports third-quarter results on Tuesday, Nov. 17, at 5 p.m. ET. Whether that 60-day collection window shrinks back toward 45 or keeps growing will say more about this debate than any podcast soundbite.