Nvidia Taps Wall Street to Fund $500 Billion AI Buildout
The chipmaker is working with six financial groups to mobilize more than $500 billion for AI infrastructure and could backstop a quarter of the deals.
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Nvidia is working with six large financial groups to mobilize more than $500 billion for artificial intelligence infrastructure, seeking to make computing capacity easier for its customers to finance.
The chipmaker signed memorandums of understanding with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to establish what it calls independent “compute financing platforms.”
The proposed platforms would create pools of capital for AI developers, cloud providers, governments and large companies buying or leasing Nvidia-based infrastructure.
The $500 billion refers to third-party capital that the partners aim to mobilize over time, not money already raised or committed by Nvidia. The company did not disclose how much each financial group might provide or when the capital would be deployed.
Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang said separately that the company could backstop as much as $125 billion, or 25% of prospective deals, Reuters reported.
A backstop would give lenders additional financial protection if a borrower or project could not meet its obligations, potentially reducing financing costs.
The initiative is intended to treat Nvidia computing systems as infrastructure capable of generating revenue over several years rather than simply as technology equipment that depreciates quickly.
“In AI, compute is revenue,” Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang said in the company’s announcement. He said Nvidia’s systems can be used across different models, workloads and customers, which the company believes makes them suitable for long-term financing.
The structures could allow companies building AI capacity to borrow against computing assets and future revenue rather than funding the entire expansion from their own balance sheets.
That would mark a significant change in how AI hardware is financed. Chips have traditionally been viewed as assets that lose value quickly as new generations arrive. Nvidia is betting that demand for its GPUs, combined with its CUDA software ecosystem, will extend their useful economic life enough for lenders and investors to underwrite them more like data centers, energy assets or other infrastructure.
Goldman Sachs Chief Executive David Solomon said the partnership creates an opportunity to develop “a market for credit backed by NVIDIA compute.”
Apollo President Jim Zelter described modern compute as a “scarce, mission-critical asset class,” while KKR said the financing model could combine long-duration capital with Nvidia’s technology to translate demand into new capacity.
The effort comes as AI developers and technology companies spend heavily on data centers, power and advanced chips to support larger models and increasingly autonomous systems.
Nvidia said the financing platforms would support what it calls “AI factories,” large-scale computing facilities built to train and run AI workloads.
The $500 billion figure is a target for third-party capital over time, not money already committed. Nvidia said the partnerships remain subject to final agreements.
The scale of Nvidia’s plan reflects the growing dependence of AI expansion on private credit and infrastructure funds. Large technology companies are expected to spend more than $730 billion this year, according to Reuters, as they build data centers and secure power, chips and networking equipment.
The partnerships remain subject to final agreements.
