Nvidia has been arguably the No. 1 profiteer of the AI boom, selling the picks and the shovels of the trade. But now it wants Wall Street to figure out how to keep paying for them.
On Monday, Nvidia announced partnerships with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR to create financing platforms intended to mobilize more than $500 billion for AI infrastructure. The money will largely come from “third-party investors,” allowing Nvidia customers to finance chips and data centers while keeping Nvidia’s own risk limited and off the balance sheet.
Details of the arrangements, like the extent of each deal, are still unknown. But analysts have been watching for a deal like this—that treats AI compute into an infrastructure asset, like a toll road or power plant—that produces cash flows and therefore can support debt. As of now, many have feared the chips instead look like a rapidly depreciating, and thus depleting, pile of graphics processors that will need more and more capital to finance.
“We have moved from an era in which companies bought chips and built data centers project by project to one in which AI factories can be financed as productive infrastructure,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wrote Tuesday. In Huang’s formulation, the premise is simple: “In AI, compute is revenue.”
