NEW YORK – Nvidia said on Aug 10 it has partnered with six major financial institutions to launch compute financing platforms aimed at raising over US$500 billion (S$640 billion) in third-party capital for AI infrastructure.
The move highlights how surging demand for AI computing capacity is drawing institutional investors, as governments, companies and start-ups race to build out data centres to support AI workloads.
Big Tech companies have signalled that spending on AI would not slow down, with combined outlays set to surpass US$730 billion in 2026.
Nvidia signed memorandums of understanding with Apollo Global Management, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs and KKR for the financing platforms.
The initiative is intended to broaden access to Nvidia-based infrastructure among frontier AI developers, enterprises, governments and cloud providers, while creating longer-duration, usage-linked investment opportunities for large asset managers and private capital firms.
“These financing platforms will help customers access scarce compute at scale and build the AI factories that will power every industry and country in the age of AI,” Nvidia chief executive officer Jensen Huang said.
Nvidia said the arrangements would “create dedicated pools of capital at significant scale at attractive rates” for its customers.
The company did not disclose the financial terms, investment commitments by individual firms or a timetable for deploying the planned US$500 billion.
Nvidia has already inked hundreds of billions of dollars worth of deals with companies across the AI ecosystem, stoking concerns from some investors that the chipmaking giant is inflating demand and valuations across the industry through the circular nature of such agreements.
The AI chipmaker had been in talks to backstop as much as US$250 billion to help OpenAI lease computing power from the US$500 billion data centre hub that a SoftBank Group subsidiary, is developing in Ohio, Bloomberg reported in July. It would easily be among the chipmaker’s biggest financing deals with a customer.
Nvidia was also in discussions to finance US$350 billion of OpenAI’s purchases of its chips for the project, people familiar with the situation said at the time.
Wall Street firms have similarly poured hundreds of billions of dollars into financing the worldwide AI data centre boom, directly investing in sites and buying the companies that operate them.
Two years ago, firms including BlackRock, Microsoft and the United Arab Emirates’ MGX investment vehicle formed what’s now known as the Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Partnership to bankroll data centres. Nvidia committed to supporting the coalition.
Nvidia has accelerated its investments and partnerships with tech and AI companies in recent months despite growing concerns about its “circular” deals.
In addition to the OpenAI financing talks, the company in July expanded a partnership with South Korean conglomerate SK Group and said the companies will be doing more than US$500 billion in business with each other. It also made a “substantial” investment in Safe Superintelligence, the AI startup co-founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. REUTERS, BLOOMBERG
