Nvidia has teamed up with some of Wall Street’s biggest banks and investors to raise up to $500 billion in capital for artificial intelligence infrastructure, giving AI companies access to more funding for the data centres and computing systems needed to support the industry’s rapid expansion.
The chipmaker said it has reached deals with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR. The investors are treating AI hardware and infrastructure, commonly known as “compute,” as an asset class for the first time.
The funding will support Nvidia’s own projects as well as infrastructure being developed by its partners.
The projects are expected to include new data centres designed to house, operate and cool large numbers of computer chips used to process AI data and tasks. The funding will also support new factories producing AI chips and help increase their availability to buyers.
Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang said, “In AI, compute is revenue,” adding that the company was bringing major long-term capital providers together to independently finance AI infrastructure.
The move reflects the growing amount of money being invested in the infrastructure needed to power AI services.
Companies including Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, SpaceX, Tesla, OpenAI and Anthropic use Nvidia’s GPUs to power their services, AI platforms and chatbots.
These companies have collectively spent more than $1 trillion on AI projects and infrastructure over the past three years, according to Goldman Sachs, with further spending expected.
The demand for Nvidia’s chips and services has also helped push the company’s stock market value up fivefold over the past three years.
Joe Bae and Scott Nuttall, co-chief executives of KKR, said compute had become a critical infrastructure asset. They added that their experience with digital infrastructure showed that delivering projects, rather than simply having ambitious plans, was the difficult part.
Jim Zelter, president of Apollo, which manages more than $1 trillion in assets, described modern compute as a scarce and “mission-critical” asset class. He said it was also positioned to support long-term economic growth and productivity gains.
Huang said Nvidia’s role as a chipmaker was the company’s starting point and described AI factories as a new class of productive and investable infrastructure.
The new financing arrangements will allow Nvidia and its partners to access additional funding as demand for AI infrastructure continues to grow.
Jane Sydenham, senior investment manager at Rathbones, told the BBC that Nvidia is a major supplier of chips needed by AI companies and needs to continue supporting the industry’s growth.
However, she also questioned whether the growing investment in AI infrastructure would generate sufficient returns in the future.
Other major companies are also securing funding for AI infrastructure.
BlackRock entered into a separate agreement with Meta last month to finance and take a majority ownership stake in a data centre in Texas.
Anthropic has also reached an agreement with Macquarie Asset Management and Singaporean sovereign wealth fund GIC to invest in its AI infrastructure.
The size of that deal was not disclosed. Anthropic said more financing was needed because demand for its Claude chatbot had grown to a level that required significant new computing capacity.
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