The community shorthand for the CoreWeave deal was precise before the financial analysis caught up. One commenter described Nvidia's $6.3 billion payment for unused compute capacity as "very hard to interpret as anything other than a free $6.3B" — a formulation that cuts through the corporate framing because it names what the transaction looks like from the outside. Nvidia is not a passive participant in the cloud compute market; it is the company whose chips made that market. Paying billions to absorb unused capacity in that same market is…