But Im saying something different than the person I was responding to. They said that the risk was due to company going bankrupt and therefore Nvidia losing its "investment" - read: the GPUs that it leased. Whereas Im saying that the risk is due to company going bankrupt, Nvidia getting its GPUs back, but now they have too many at hand than they can usefully deploy/sell. The two are risks triggered by the same event, but the former is about 1 order of magnitude greater than the latter. The former is lost capital, the latter is lost opportunity - read: return on the capital.
In leasing to OpenAI, they aren't deploying those GPUs to other productive uses.
The costs are not just the raw cost of the physical asset, but also the opportunity costs of doing "thing a" vs. "thing b".
The GPUs will also depreciate during the time they're in OpenAI's possession, so again, if that investment doesn't pay off they aren't just getting GPUs back, they're getting "used GPUs" or "more used GPUs" back, not the original or full value of the originally leased asset. Naturally, the lease has to have those costs built in to be a good deal, but the lease has to fulfill to terms for that to happen.
In the end, leasing them means they carry the early risk of the lease not being fulfilled... but they should gain more in the than if they just straight up sold them.
OpenAI is not going bankrupt tomorrow. But in the universes where it does go bankrupt in a few years, it would mean the AI bubble had popped, and the demand for top-end chips would have collapsed.
