AI Deals Go Round and Round & Cava’s CEO 8/12/26

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**Katie Kramer** (1:02)
Hi, I'm CNBC producer Katie Kramer, today on Squawk Pod. Everybody's talking about Nvidia's massive deal with Wall Street to shore up AI infrastructure, but what are the holes in the case?

**Ed Zitron** (1:13)
Everybody's propping up what is really the end of the era of hypergrowth.

**Katie Kramer** (1:18)
Ed Zitron of the Better Offline podcast has a bearish take.

**Ed Zitron** (1:22)
They basically pay people to rent back the GPUs that they sell them. They help raise the debt. They find the sites. It's vendor financing.

**Katie Kramer** (1:30)
Then the salmonella and cyclospora outbreaks hitting restaurants. Cava CEO Brett Schulman has his eye on consumer confidence.

**Brett Schulman** (1:38)
Our ingredients weren't sourced from any of the impacted areas of the food safety outbreaks. We did see broader consumer concerns around leafy green consumption, fresh produce consumption.

**Katie Kramer** (1:50)
And in other health news, President Trump has signed an executive order to change childhood vaccines. Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb on what's to come.

**Scott Gottlieb** (1:59)
You're going to see an effort to go state by state by some of the anti-vaccine groups to put pressure on state legislators to do away with those school entrance requirements.

**Katie Kramer** (2:08)
All that today with special guests in our anchor chairs. It is Wednesday, August 12, 2026 Squawk Pod begins right now.
First up today on the podcast, the business news story of the week, Chipmaker Nvidia struck a deal with six of the largest Wall Street firms for 500 billion. That's half a trillion dollars to fund the massive build out of artificial intelligence to meet seemingly endless demand. CEO Jensen Huang calls it a big concept and he got buyers. Huang was on CNBC earlier this week.

**Jensen Huang** (2:44)
We're talking about an extraordinarily significant infrastructure build.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:48)
With a very hefty price tag.

**SPEAKER_8** (2:50)
It's a hefty price tag.

**Jensen Huang** (2:51)
Each gigawatt is something like 50, 60 billion dollars. And so there's energy involved, there's land power and shell involved, and of course there's the computing part of it.

**Katie Kramer** (2:59)
Jensen Huang believes AI, the power of computing, is the newest asset class, as valuable as stocks, commodities, other investment vehicles. We'll get into this with our anchors for the rest of this week, Leslie Picker, Mike Santoli and Brian Sullivan.

**Brian Sullivan** (3:16)
Good morning, by the way. Leslie, Michael, good morning.

**Katie Kramer** (3:20)
And if this deal, historic in nature, is all good news, the details matter. What types of borrowers will emerge? What will rates look like? Where are these factories going to be built? Nvidia and the partnering companies say, it's time to move forward into the future. The AI market is huge and getting larger. So we talked to a critic of the whole deal. We'll get started with Leslie Picker here, sitting in on Squawk Box.

**Leslie Picker** (3:44)
Our next guest says, the new initiative is vendor financing by proxy. Ed Zitron is the CEO of EZ Primary Research and host of the Better Offline podcast. Ed, good to see you.

**Ed Zitron** (3:54)
Good to be here.

**Leslie Picker** (3:55)
So you don't think this alleviates the concerns about circular financing?

**Ed Zitron** (3:59)
No, this fund, which is, by the way, still a memorandum of understanding. We do not actually have contracts. Is it's just vendor financing. Nvidia is raising the funding. They're finding the customers.
They're the vendor, they're the customer in some cases with CoreWeave. They're a large customer with Lambda. They basically pay people to rent back the GPUs that they sell them. They help raise the debt, they find the sites. It's vendor financing, but they've been smarter than the CISCOs and the Lucents in the past, by not actually becoming a bank.

**Leslie Picker** (4:29)
Well, I think that's an important part in that the financiers that they're working with are the ones who are going to determine what the interest rate is that they lend on, as opposed to Nvidia, removing itself from that process, which creates more of a traditional kind of lender borrower dynamic and such that we will lend to you, but here's the price by which it will cost for you to actually borrow this money.