Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has seen his company’s market value soar amid the ongoing AI boom in the technology sector. In a significant strategic move, Nvidia has teamed up with some of Wall Street’s largest banks and investors to raise $500bn (£370bn) in capital dedicated to artificial intelligence infrastructure.
The chipmaker confirmed it has struck deals with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR. For the first time, these major investors are treating AI hardware and infrastructure—often referred to as “compute”—as a distinct asset class.
“In AI, compute is revenue,” said Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia. “We are bringing the world’s leading long-term capital providers together to independently underwrite AI infrastructure.”
In a statement on Monday, Huang reflected on the company’s evolution, referring to Nvidia’s early role as a chip-maker as merely the beginning. “Today, we are helping create a new class of productive, investable infrastructure: AI factories,” he noted.
The financing will support both Nvidia’s internal projects and those led by its partners. By tapping into funding from these banking and investment giants, the companies will be able to finance a larger portion of the AI boom. This capital will fund the construction of new data centres designed to house, operate, and cool miles of stacked computer chips that process complex AI data and actions.
Additionally, the funds will support new factories to manufacture the AI chips required to power these systems, thereby increasing their availability to buyers. “Compute has become a critical infrastructure asset,” Joe Bae and Scott Nuttall, co-chief executives of KKR, said in a joint statement. “As we’ve scaled our approach to digital infrastructure, we’ve learned that delivery, not ambition, is the hard part.”
Essentially every major technology company, including Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, SpaceX, Tesla, OpenAI, and Anthropic, relies on Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) to power their services and AI platforms. These companies have collectively spent over $1tn in just three years on AI projects, with expectations for significantly higher spending in the future.
Jim Zelter, president of Apollo, which manages more than $1tn in assets, stated that modern compute has emerged as a scarce, mission-critical asset class. He added that the sector is “positioned to drive significant long-term economic growth and productivity gains.”
The industry is already seeing individual moves in this space, such as BlackRock’s deal last month to finance and take a majority ownership stake in a Meta data centre in Texas. Similarly, Anthropic recently partnered with Macquarie Asset Management and GIC for its own AI infrastructure investment. While Nvidia did not specify the exact size of its individual deal, it noted that financing is essential as demand for its popular chatbot, Claude, continues to grow, requiring significant new compute capacity.
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