I think it's far more than just being illegal. There are basically no companies that don't always cook their books (very) illegally. For example, I said many large/mega US-listed companies may falsify their cash flow figures in the name of overseas cash and stabilize & inflate their FCF yields. My suspicion is that there are extremely serious falsifications and misstatements about NVDA so I said it may be a scam.
For example, there may be fraudulent round-tripping "sales" like SenseTime (a typical China Hustle) and NVDA is only backed by borrowed cash from private market investors to keep their shit from showing up on the cash flow statement.
provides funds to customers that in turn are used to purchase goods from SenseTime that might never have been delivered.
And
Our research uncovered numerous potential undisclosed related parties with SenseTime. Many instances were majority-owned by senior-titled officers of SenseTime or related to one another through publicly available sources. SenseTime’s conscious choice to keep these entities off the balance sheet is deeply worrying, especially in light of the revenue round-tripping described above.
I suspect that what appears to be free cash flow of NVDA is actually financing cash flow of its affiliated entities (such as CoreWeave but much more), backed up by money from private debt funds that have been booming lately.
I think as in Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI there may be this same problem, i.e., because of the importance western investors place on free cash flow, many US-listed/Europe-listed companies use a similar approach to falsify their own free cash flows from financing cash flows from related parties (and much of the cash is from private market so it inflates the FCF yield of the public market), but NVDA may have taken this to the extreme.