Nvidia teams up with Wall Street giants to channel over $500b into AI infrastructure

Nvidia has joined forces with major Wall Street financial firms — including BlackRock, Blackstone and Goldman Sachs — to channel more than $500 billion in outside capital into AI infrastructure. Rather than forming a single large joint fund, the initiative will establish multiple financial platforms designed to supply funding that Nvidia's customers need to secure computing resources.

According to Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal, Nvidia on Monday signed agreements with six firms — Apollo Global Management, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs and KKR — to build what the parties are calling "compute financing platforms."

The participating firms aim to deploy more than $500 billion in outside capital over the coming years, and the total could grow beyond that figure.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a CNBC interview that all of the funding would come from third-party capital, meaning the six investment firms would raise money from their own investors.

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink also told CNBC that future deals would carry "high credit quality" and could offer attractive debt-investment returns to investors who are "overallocated" to equities.

The platforms are designed to help Nvidia's customers secure financing on competitive terms to build large-scale AI infrastructure. The participating firms said they plan to create a pool of capital capable of supplying funds to Nvidia customers at "attractive interest rates."

Few details have been disclosed about the timing or structure of the financing, but executives said the initiative would focus on debt financing to help Nvidia's largest customers gain access to computing resources, Bloomberg reported.

In a statement, Huang said: "We are bringing together the world's leading long-duration capital providers to independently finance AI infrastructure. These financing platforms will help customers access scarce compute at scale and build AI factories."

The AI race has expanded beyond securing advanced chips to building the data centers and computing infrastructure needed to run them, generating enormous demand for capital, the Wall Street Journal said, adding that Wall Street firms are deploying a range of financial tools to meet that need.

Apollo and Blackstone earlier this year signed a similar compute financing agreement with Broadcom to help companies including Anthropic fund access to computing resources built on Broadcom-developed chips, an arrangement that also covers computing infrastructure powered by Google processors.

Nvidia has been pursuing a series of large-scale financing arrangements targeting AI data centers.

Bloomberg earlier reported that Nvidia is in talks to guarantee up to $250 billion to help OpenAI lease a 10 GW data center campus being developed by SoftBank Group subsidiary SB Energy in Ohio. If the deal closes, it would be the largest financing arrangement Nvidia has struck with a customer.

Sources at the time said Nvidia was also discussing a separate $350 billion financing arrangement to help OpenAI purchase Nvidia chips for the same project.

Wall Street firms have also poured hundreds of billions of dollars into funding the data center construction boom, investing directly in facilities or acquiring operating companies. Two years ago, BlackRock, Microsoft and UAE investment vehicle MGX formed a consortium to finance data center development.

However, signs of market caution over Nvidia's own borrowing costs have emerged. According to bond pricing firm Solve, the yield premium demanded by bond investors lending to Nvidia has doubled since June and now stands about 0.40 percentage points above US government bonds of equivalent maturity.