Nvidia teams with Wall Street firms to help finance $500 billion for AI infrastructure

By Mike Murphy

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks at the company-wide convention in Taipei on May 27.

Nvidia late Monday announced a partnership with six Wall Street financial institutions designed to raise more than $500 billion of third-party capital to fund the buildout of AI infrastructure.

The chipmaker said in a statement it had signed a memorandum of understanding with Apollo (APO), BlackRock (BLK), Blackstone (BX), Brookfield (CA:BN), Goldman Sachs (GS) and KKR (KKR) to create partnerships that would allow Nvidia's (NVDA) customers to finance the cost of computing power at a global scale. That would include frontier AI labs, enterprise and AI clouds, Nvidia said.

"This is a big moment for computing and [Nvidia]," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a social-media post announcing the deal. "We've made the leap from building chips to creating a new investable asset class: AI factory infrastructure."

"AI has reached an inflection point," Huang added, "and the infrastructure behind it is becoming one of the world's most productive assets. In AI, compute is revenue."

"These financing platforms will help customers access scarce compute at scale and build the DSX AI factories that will power every industry and country in the age of AI," Huang said in a separate statement.

By using institutional investors, Huang said the deal is designed to avoid concerns of circular financing for the AI buildout. "The demand is real ... Nvidia provides the platform; the investors make independent financing decisions," he said in the social-media post.

He added that Nvidia has the option to backstop up to 25% of potential deals.

"We're in a pivotal moment of a historic AI investment cycle," Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said in a statement. "Nvidia's full-stack platform is in high demand and uniquely positioned at the center of that global buildout. "Our investment and distribution roles reflect our confidence in Nvidia's leadership, and we're excited for the new opportunity to create a market for credit backed by Nvidia compute."

Earlier this year, fellow chipmaker Broadcom signed a similar financing arrangement with Apollo and Blackstone.

Nvidia shares fell nearly 3% on Monday, but are up around 17% year to date.

-Mike Murphy

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08-10-26 2228ET