GoKawiilNvidia is attempting to turn its artificial intelligence chips into Wall Street's newest asset class, partnering with six large asset managers on a $500 billion financing push designed to treat compute infrastructure much like commercial real estate, toll roads or other assets you can borrow against.
The chipmaker signed memorandums of understanding with Apollo Global Management, Blackstone, BlackRock , Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs and KKR to establish financing platforms for Nvidia's customers, the company said Monday in a statement.
Executives from the seven companies joined CNBC's Becky Quick in a rare live joint interview to discuss the effort.
The effort aims to mobilize more than $500 billion in third-party capital for hyperscalers, frontier AI labs, and enterprises to build out data centers and acquire Nvidia hardware, marking a potentially important shift in how AI infrastructure is funded. By using institutional credit, insurance funds and private capital to underwrite GPUs and data centers, Nvidia is helping its end users secure financing without tapping their own balance sheets.
"We used to build chips that we sell, and these are technology components that people buy and use. But now Nvidia's AI factory platform is really an investable asset, an infrastructure asset, and the reason for that is because it's productive, is revenue generating," Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC.
Huang argued that because Nvidia's hardware is broadly adopted, flexible and transferable across customers, lenders can reliably underwrite compute as a revenue-generating asset with an extended life.
"This is a really great opportunity for us to build out the infrastructure, take advantage of an asset that is investable, long life, and productive," Huang said. "With the partnerships that we have here, we can support a really broad ecosystem build out."
Historically, GPUs have been viewed as rapidly depreciating hardware. Nvidia's effort challenges that assumption, transforming AI compute capacity into long-term, bankable infrastructure, though skeptics may question whether AI chips can retain their value as newer generations emerge.
"Fundamentally, what's different about this industry and this way of doing computing is that the computer is now part of the infrastructure, like electricity, like the internet, and so you have to think about it like it's infrastructure," Huang said in the CNBC interview.