NVIDIA partners with six Wall Street giants to launch $500B AI compute financing platform

On August 10 local time, NVIDIA announced signing of memoranda of understanding with Apollo Global Management, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs, and KKR — six top financial institutions — to establish an independent compute financing platform aimed at mobilizing over $500 billion in third-party capital for AI infrastructure construction in the long term.

Under the plan, the six institutions will set up dedicated capital pools offering competitively priced financing to AI labs, enterprises, and cloud providers in NVIDIA's ecosystem, supporting hardware procurement and construction of DSX-architecture AI factories. NVIDIA acts as a matchmaker rather than capital provider, connecting clients with capital while ensuring funds ultimately flow to NVIDIA chip procurement.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said: NVIDIA started by making chips; today it is helping create a new kind of productive, investable infrastructure — the AI factory. These financing platforms will help customers scale access to scarce compute. Huang further noted that this is the first time chips have become an investable asset class, generating revenue with high productivity, long life, universal substitutability, and high flexibility. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said the partnership is comparable to the birth of mortgage-backed securities in the 1970s and a new chapter in financial engineering.

After the announcement, NVIDIA shares closed down 2.86% on Monday. S&P Global data shows NVIDIA's 5-year credit default swap spread briefly rose to around 77 basis points, the biggest single-day jump in two weeks. NVIDIA may choose to guarantee up to $125 billion of potential deals, 25% of total transactions. Previously NVIDIA was in talks with OpenAI for up to $100 billion of investment and $350 billion of chip procurement financing.