Nvidia turns to Wall Street giants to raise $500bn for AI infrastructure

Nvidia has secured a $500 billion financing commitment from six major Wall Street firms to fund artificial intelligence infrastructure development globally.

The coalition includes Apollo Global Management, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs and KKR, with deals expected to reach market within months.

Financing will use compute power as collateral, structured through private offerings and bonds issued by special-purpose entities capable of raising tens of billions at a time.

As the only bank in the partnership, Goldman Sachs is positioned to lead public debt deals whilst also distributing investment returns through its asset-management arm.

"We are bringing the world's leading long-term capital providers together to independently underwrite AI infrastructure," Nvidia's chief executive Jensen Huang said.

US investment giants including Apollo Global Management, Blackstone, BlackRock and Brookfield Asset Management are partnering with Nvidia to source $500 billion in financing for artificial intelligence infrastructure.

The coalition, which also includes Goldman Sachs Group and KKR, will "create dedicated pools of capital at significant scale at attractive rates for Nvidia customers", according to a statement on Monday. Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said in a CNBC interview that he only approached six firms for the commitment, and none turned him down.

The effort comes with a huge headline figure, but few details on the timing and structure of the financing, or whether the plan goes beyond the string of AI deals already driving a large chunk of Wall Street's biggest transactions.

Executives indicated that it will focus on debt financing to provide access to compute for Nvidia's largest customers and that there are already many deals in the works that would qualify towards this commitment.

"We are bringing the world's leading long-term capital providers together to independently underwrite AI infrastructure," Mr Huang said. "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 has already signed 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.

Now the firm is publicly tapping the biggest private markets firms to provide funding for its customers amid the trillions of dollars that are expected to be needed for the data centres, power stations and chips that will power the next era of AI.

The money will all be third-party capital, Mr Huang said in the CNBC interview, which also featured executives from each of the six Wall Street firms.

BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink said on CNBC the future deals will offer "high credit quality" and allow attractive yields in debt for investors who are "overinvested in equities".

Goldman Sachs chief executive David Solomon said: "It's a big infrastructure build, and the capital markets are signalling that there's a lot of capital available to support it." Mr Solomon added that his firm is trying to find different ways of "getting the capital to the right places to extend this or accelerate this".

The deals will use compute power as collateral for the debt, which will take the form of private offerings as well as bonds by special-purpose entities, according to a person familiar with the matter. Those vehicles could issue as much as tens of billions of dollars in debt at a time and then lease the compute to Nvidia's clients, said the person, who asked not to be identified.

Such deals are set to start coming to market within months, the person said. The compute is also liquid, which means financing could be reallocated to different buyers of the compute, helping reduce the risk to debt investors.

As the only bank in the partnership, Goldman Sachs is positioning itself to be the lead bookrunner on the public debt deals coming to market. It will also gather investment returns from debt distributed through its asset-management arm, which oversees more than $4 trillion in assets.

## Nvidia's financing demands

In a post on X, Mr Huang characterised Nvidia's compute as "an investable infrastructure asset" and noted that the company may provide some financing support of "up to 25 per cent of an opportunity".

"Our role is to help unlock a very large pool of independent capital while maintaining disciplined risk exposure," he wrote.

Nvidia had already been in talks to backstop as much as $250 billion to help OpenAI lease computing power from the $500 billion, 10-gigawatt data centre hub that SB Energy, a SoftBank subsidiary, is developing in Ohio, Bloomberg reported last month. It would easily be among the chipmaker's biggest financing deals with a customer.

Nvidia was also in discussions to finance $350 billion of OpenAI's purchases of its chips for the project, people familiar with the situation said at the time, asking not to be identified because the talks were private.

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 UAE's MGX investment vehicle formed what's now known as the AI 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 last month expanded a partnership with South Korean conglomerate SK Group and said the companies will be doing more than $500 billion in business with each other. It also made a "substantial" investment in Safe Superintelligence, the AI start-up cofounded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever.