Nvidia is turning its artificial intelligence chips into Wall Street’s newest asset class. It is partnering with six major asset managers in a $500 billion funding drive aimed at treating computing infrastructure like commercial real estate, toll roads and other borrowed assets.
The chipmaker has signed memorandums of understanding with the following companies: Apollo Global Management, black stone, black rock, Brookfield Asset Management, goldman sachs and KKR It will establish a financing platform for Nvidia customers, the company said in a statement Monday.
Executives from seven companies participated in a rare live joint interview with CNBC’s Becky Quick to discuss the announcement.
The initiative aims to mobilize more than $500 billion in third-party capital for hyperscalers, frontier AI labs, and companies to build data centers and acquire Nvidia hardware, potentially marking a significant shift in the way AI infrastructure is financed. By using institutional credit, insurance funds, and private capital to underwrite GPUs and data centers, Nvidia helps end users secure financing without exploiting their own balance sheets.
“This is the first time technology chips have become an investable asset class,” Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC. “These are now income-generating assets: they are highly productive, long-lived, fungible, and flexible.”
Huang argued that because Nvidia’s hardware is widely adopted and transferable between customers, lenders can reliably underwrite computing as a long-lived, revenue-producing asset.
Historically, GPUs have been viewed as rapidly depreciating hardware. Nvidia’s work challenges that assumption and transforms AI computing power into long-term profitable infrastructure. However, skeptics may wonder whether AI chips can maintain their value as new generations emerge.
“Basically, what’s different about this industry and this way of computing is that computers are part of the infrastructure, like electricity and the Internet, so you have to think of computers like infrastructure,” Huang said in an interview with CNBC.
Alternative asset managers are keen to put money into digital infrastructure, leveraging institutional investors and insurance capital to finance projects. Apollo and Blackstone, among others, have already arranged debt and equity financing for companies including Anthropic.
The funding drive comes in the wake of global market turmoil in July, when investors began questioning whether Big Tech’s AI investments would pay off. As hyperscalers pour hundreds of billions of dollars into data centers and hardware, rating agencies such as Moody’s are warning that unprecedented capital spending is starting to squeeze free cash flow and forcing tech giants to take on heavier debt.
“Financial Engineering”
Leaders of Wall Street groups, including BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, Blackstone President John Gray and Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, said in a news release Monday that computing is rapidly evolving into a critical asset class that will power the next phase of the global economy.
“We are at a pivotal moment in a historic AI investment cycle,” Solomon said in the release. “Our investment and sales role reflects our confidence in NVIDIA’s leadership, and we are excited about the new opportunity to create a credit market backed by NVIDIA’s compute.”
Solomon told CNBC’s Quick that Jensen approached Wall Street giants about the idea for the fundraising project.
Blackstone’s Gray told CNBC that AI computing will be viewed as a “bankable asset class” in the same way that mortgage lenders consider housing. Demand for AI is outstripping supply, Gray said, with Blackstone’s use of AI at portfolio companies surging sevenfold this year.
BlackRock’s Fink said he believes the project is the beginning of “the next future of financial engineering” akin to the creation of mortgage-backed securities in the 1970s. Some funding has already been raised, but BlackRock plans to “raise significant additional funding,” he said.
“We need to raise this money and do this as quickly as possible, because I think it’s really essential for the United States to be the world’s AI leader,” Fink told CNBC.
