Nvidia, Wall Street asset managers partner on $500B AI push

Nvidia is attempting to turn its artificial intelligence chips into Wall Street’s newest asset class, partnering with six large asset managers on a $500 billion financing push designed to treat compute infrastructure much like commercial real estate, toll roads or other assets to borrow against.

The chipmaker signed memorandums of understanding with Apollo Global Management, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs and KKR to establish financing platforms for Nvidia’s customers, the company said Monday in a statement.

Executives from the seven companies joined CNBC’s Becky Quick in a rare, live joint interview to discuss the announcement.

The effort aims to mobilize more than $500 billion in third-party capital for hyperscalers, frontier AI labs and enterprises to build out data centers and acquire Nvidia hardware, marking a potentially important shift in how AI infrastructure is funded. By using institutional credit, insurance funds and private capital to underwrite GPUs and data centers, Nvidia is helping its end users secure financing without tapping their own balance sheets.

“This is really the first time that technology chips have become an investable asset class,” Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC. “These are revenue-generating assets now. 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.

Historically, GPUs have been viewed as rapidly depreciating hardware. Nvidia’s effort challenges that assumption, transforming AI compute capacity into long-term, bankable infrastructure, though skeptics may question whether AI chips can retain their value as newer generations emerge.

“Fundamentally, what’s different about this industry and this way of doing computing is that the computer is now part of the infrastructure, like electricity, like the internet, and so you have to think about it like it’s infrastructure,” Huang said in the CNBC interview.

Alternative asset managers have been eager to deploy capital into digital infrastructure, tapping institutional and insurance capital to finance projects. Apollo and Blackstone, among others, have already structured debt and equity financing for companies including Anthropic.

The financing push comes after a July swoon in global markets in which investors began asking whether Big Tech’s AI investments would pay off. With hyperscalers on track to pour hundreds of billions into data centers and hardware, rating agencies like Moody’s have warned that unprecedented capital expenditures are beginning to squeeze free cash flow and force tech giants into heavier debt loads.

Leaders across the Wall Street group — including BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, Blackstone President Jon Gray and Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon — said in the news release Monday that compute has rapidly evolved into a critical asset class driving the next leg of global economic growth.

“We’re in a pivotal moment of a historic AI investment cycle,” Solomon said in the release. “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.”

Jensen approached the Wall Street giants about his idea for the financing project, Solomon told CNBC’s Quick.

AI compute will be seen as a “financeable asset class” in the same way that mortgage lenders look at homes, Gray of Blackstone said on CNBC. Demand for AI is outstripping supply, with use at Blackstone portfolio companies surging sevenfold this year, Gray said.

BlackRock’s Fink said that he believed this project was the start of the “next future for financial engineering,” akin to the creation of mortgage-backed securities in the 1970s. Some funds have already been raised, but BlackRock will be “raising quite a bit more,” he 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.