Nvidia's ambitious investments, including guarantees for up to $500 billion in data-center financing and an agreement to backstop a massive Ohio data center project by OpenAI, have raised investors' eyebrows in recent weeks.

Colette Kress, the chip giant's CFO, defended the investment strategy on today's earnings call. Kress said Nvidia expects big frontier AI labs like OpenAI "to become the largest technology companies in history."

These labs face a bottleneck, however, in accessing all the computing power they need to develop products and improve models, and that's why they need Nvidia's financial help, Kress said.

"We recognize the scale of this support, and we know some will call this circular financing. We see it differently," she said. "The equity returns on our invested capital will be excellent."