Nvidia partners with Apollo, BlackRock and others on AI financing push targeting over $500 billion

Nvidia and six major Wall Street firms are sketching out financing platforms aimed at mobilizing more than $500 billion of mostly third-party capital over time for AI infrastructure, as Jensen Huang argues that AI compute should be financed like long-lived, revenue-producing infrastructure rather than treated as a fast-depreciating technology expense. The arrangements with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR remain preliminary and are governed by memorandums of understanding rather than binding contracts, with borrowers, rates, locations and deployment timelines still largely unspecified. Huang said the push would help customers build out AI data centers and lock in demand for Nvidia hardware by reframing specialized computing capacity as a bankable asset that can generate income over years and serve multiple users. He described Nvidia's chips as part of infrastructure similar to electricity or the internet, while the company says its so-called AI factories use power and data to produce intelligent systems for applications including chatbots, image and video generation, drug design and robotics. The effort follows an initial AI buildout funded largely through debt and equity issuance by major technology companies, with investor debate still centered on depreciation, utilization, residual values and the risk of excess capacity.