With chip development you need scale in order to get to the edge. It makes sense to finance demand so you can get to scale it's not like it's a ponzi scheme.

Anthropic gets access to limited compute resources and Amazon gets demand to justify increased R&D and capex + feedback from the best users in the field.

With NVidia/OpenAI actual graphics cards did change hands. Vendor financing, like when a car dealership gives you a loan to buy a new car, is actually pretty normal.

And I think Oracle got into it as well, and later suffered