Nvidia has roped in finance giants to rustle up more than $500bn for the AI infrastructure feeding its own monster.
A consortium including Apollo Global, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs and KKR is teaming with Nvidia to fund the AI build-out.
According to Financial Times the deal puts Nvidia in bed with the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street, as the outfit looks for fresh ways to pay for chips, power and data centres without everyone noticing how circular the whole racket is getting.
Nvidia shares fell about 1.1 per cent on Monday after the FT first reported the arrangement, wiping nearly $60bn from its market value. The stock finished the day 2.9 per cent lower.
Nvidia said that it had signed memorandums of understanding with the six Wall Street firms to “mobilise over $500bn of third-party capital for the build-out of AI infrastructure over time”.
The agreement will create dedicated pools of capital to finance Nvidia’s AI ambitions “at attractive rates for Nvidia customers”.
It shows Nvidia working harder to cultivate private capital as a money hose for itself and its clients. The cash is meant to keep the AI boom fed with chips, power production and data centres.
Blackstone president and chief operating officer Jon Gray said: “We continue to be enormous investors globally across the Nvidia ecosystem, and this announcement further underscores our confidence in their platform and the future of AI infrastructure.”
Nvidia said the financing agreement was the first of its kind and would support “AI infrastructure build-out across Nvidia’s ecosystem, including leading frontier AI labs, enterprises and AI clouds”.
Nvidia founder and chief executive Jensen Huang said: “We began by building chips; today, we are helping create a new class of productive, investable infrastructure: AI factories.”
The $5.26tn chipmaker has planted itself in the middle of the AI boom, flogging chips, infrastructure and software to almost anyone building the stuff.
Its GPUs underpin most leading US AI models, which gives Nvidia a handy position whenever another lab discovers it needs a warehouse full of expensive silicon.
Nvidia often provides financial backing to help AI partners raise debt in capital markets, which then helps boost its own revenue. The circular shape of these deals has raised concerns about concentrated risk in the sector.
Separately, Nvidia was in talks to provide a huge guarantee for a 10-gigawatt data centre project in Ohio leased to OpenAI, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The move shows Nvidia deepening ties with private capital giants, which are preparing to pour trillions of dollars from insurance, retail and institutional investors into AI infrastructure.
