Nvidia has partnered with several of Wall Street's largest banks and investment firms to raise $500 billion for artificial intelligence infrastructure. The deal was announced this week.
The chipmaker said it is working with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR. These investors will treat AI hardware as a new type of asset class for the first time.
Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said computing power now equals revenue in the AI industry. He said the company is bringing together long term capital providers to fund AI infrastructure on their own.
The money raised will support Nvidia's own projects. It will also fund projects built by its partners across the tech industry.
What the Money Will Build
The funding is expected to pay for new data centers. These centers house and cool the computer chips that run AI systems.
The investment will also help build new factories. These factories will make more AI chips so companies can buy and use them faster.
KKR co-chief executives Joe Bae and Scott Nuttall said computing has become a critical piece of infrastructure. They said building these projects is harder than planning them.
Nearly every large tech company relies on Nvidia's chips, known as graphics processing units or GPUs. These chips power AI platforms and chatbots used around the world.
Jane Sydenham, a senior investment manager at Rathbones, told the BBC that Nvidia produces chips that everyone in AI needs. She said the company must keep up with growing demand.
She also raised a concern. She said more money is going into these projects, but it is unclear if they will all earn a strong return in the future.
Big Tech's Growing AI Spending
Companies using Nvidia's chips include Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, SpaceX, Tesla, OpenAI and Anthropic. These firms have spent over one trillion dollars on AI projects in the past three years.
That spending has helped push Nvidia's stock market value up five times over the same period. More spending on AI is expected in the coming years.
Huang said Nvidia started as a chip maker. He said the company is now helping build a new kind of infrastructure he calls AI factories.
Apollo president Jim Zelter said modern computing power has become a scarce and critical asset. He said it could help drive long term economic growth.
Some of Nvidia's partners have already made their own deals. BlackRock recently agreed to help finance and take a majority stake in a data center project with Meta in Texas.
Anthropic also signed a new financing deal with Macquarie Asset Management and GIC, a sovereign wealth fund based in Singapore. Anthropic did not share the size of the deal.
Anthropic said its chatbot Claude has grown so popular that it needs much more computing power to keep up with demand.
