Nvidia has partnered with six of Wall Street’s largest financial institutions to mobilize more than $500 billion in capital for artificial intelligence infrastructure, a move that reframes the company’s chips as a bankable asset class rather than rapidly depreciating hardware.
The chipmaker signed memorandums of understanding with Apollo Global Management, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs, and KKR. The deals aim to establish financing platforms for Nvidia’s customers, including hyperscalers, frontier AI labs, and enterprises, enabling them to build data centers and acquire Nvidia hardware without tapping their own balance sheets. Executives from all seven companies joined CNBC’s Becky Quick for a rare live joint interview to discuss the announcement.
This is the first time technology chips have been treated as an investable asset class, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC. “These are revenue-generating assets now,” Huang said. “They’re productive, they’re long-lived, they’re fungible, they’re flexible.”
Huang argued that because Nvidia’s hardware is broadly adopted and transferable across customers, lenders can reliably underwrite compute as a revenue-generating asset with an extended life. He likened the shift to infrastructure like electricity and the internet. “Fundamentally, what’s different about this industry and this way of doing computing is that the computer is now part of the infrastructure,” Huang said in the CNBC interview.
A new financial category
Historically, GPUs have been viewed as rapidly depreciating hardware. Nvidia’s effort challenges that assumption. The company is positioning AI compute capacity as long-term, bankable infrastructure, though skeptics may question whether AI chips can retain their value as newer generations emerge.
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink told CNBC he believed the project was the start of the “next future for financial engineering,” comparing it to the creation of mortgage-backed securities in the 1970s. Some funds have already been raised. BlackRock will be “raising quite a bit more,” Fink said. “We need to raise this money as fast as possible and put this to work, because I think it’s really imperative that the United States is the leader in AI in the world,” Fink said on CNBC.
Blackstone President Jon Gray said on CNBC that AI compute will be seen as a “financeable asset class” in the same way mortgage lenders look at homes. Demand for AI is outstripping supply. Use at Blackstone portfolio companies has surged sevenfold this year, Gray said.
Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said in the news release that the firms are in a historic AI investment cycle and expressed confidence in Nvidia’s leadership, saying the partnership creates a market for credit backed by Nvidia compute. Solomon told CNBC’s Quick that Jensen Huang personally approached the Wall Street giants with the idea for the financing project.
KKR co-CEOs Joe Bae and Scott Nuttall said in a joint statement that compute has become a critical infrastructure asset. “As we’ve scaled our approach to digital infrastructure, we’ve learned that delivery, not ambition, is the hard part,” they said. Jim Zelter, president of Apollo, a lender managing more than $1 trillion in assets, said modern compute has emerged as a scarce, mission-critical asset class positioned to drive significant long-term economic growth and productivity gains.
Context and caution
The financing push comes after a July swoon in global markets. Investors began questioning whether Big Tech’s AI investments would pay off. Rating agencies including Moody’s have warned that unprecedented capital expenditures are squeezing free cash flow and forcing tech giants into heavier debt loads.
Essentially every major technology and AI company uses Nvidia’s GPUs to power their services, including Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, SpaceX, Tesla, OpenAI, and Anthropic. These companies have collectively spent over $1 trillion in just three years on AI projects and infrastructure, with more spending expected. Demand has surged. Nvidia’s stock market value has risen fivefold in three years.
The financing will support Nvidia’s own projects and those of its partners. Projects will likely include construction of new data centers to house, operate, and cool stacked computer chips, as well as new factories to manufacture AI chips. Huang referred to Nvidia’s role as a chip-maker as the company’s beginning. “Today, we are helping create a new class of productive, investable infrastructure: AI factories,” he said.
Alternative asset managers have already structured debt and equity financing for AI companies. BlackRock last month entered a deal with Meta to finance and take a majority ownership stake in a data center in Texas. Anthropic recently struck a deal with Macquarie Asset Management and GIC, an investment bank in Singapore, for its own AI infrastructure investment. The company said more financing was needed because demand for its chatbot Claude requires significant new compute.