Nvidia Taps Wall Street Giants for $500 Billion in AI Infrastructure Funding

Some of Wall Street's biggest financial firms are partnering with Nvidia to pour half a trillion dollars into the AI industry's infrastructure buildout. Nvidia said Monday it has struck deals with Apollo Global Management, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR — the first time those investors are treating AI hardware and infrastructure as an asset class like stocks, bonds and commodities, the chipmaker said.

Where the Money Goes

The funds will support both Nvidia's own projects and those of its partners, including construction of new data centers to house servers filled with hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GPUs, and new manufacturing facilities to produce the chips. The financing lets Nvidia's biggest customers — Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic, which have collectively spent more than a trillion dollars on AI projects over the past three years — underwrite infrastructure without drawing on their own balance sheets.

An Asset Class, Not a Product

This is really the first time that technology chips have become an investable asset class, CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC. These are revenue-generating assets now. They're productive, long-lived, fungible and flexible. The announcement builds on last month's $500 billion supply deal with SK hynix for memory chips, and Bloomberg has reported Nvidia is in talks on a $250 billion financing package for OpenAI's 10-gigawatt data center project in Ohio, plus a separate $350 billion deal to finance chip purchases.

Not everyone is convinced. Some investors have grown wary of what they call circular dealmaking — Nvidia arranging financing that ultimately flows back into purchases of its own hardware. The deals nonetheless mark the clearest sign yet that institutional capital now treats AI compute as infrastructure in the same category as pipelines and power plants, with Nvidia's stock up roughly fivefold over the past three years on the AI spending wave.