GoKawiilis a reporter who writes about tech, money, and human behavior. She joined The Verge in 2014 as science editor. Previously, she was a reporter at Bloomberg.
April – 1805
Napoleon is master of Europe
Only the British fleet stands before him
Compute is now an asset class
I see it is once again time to talk financial innovation. Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR are all working with Nvidia to put together $500 billion in financing to turn compute into an asset class.
“This is really the first time that technology chips have become an investable asset class,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said to CNBC. “These are revenue-generating assets now. They’re productive, they’re long-lived, they’re fungible, they’re flexible.”
“This is the very beginning, like what it was when I started in the mortgage-backed securities market in the 1970s.”
Huang said something very different about Nvidia’s own last-generation Hopper chips last year. “When Blackwell starts shipping in volume, you couldn’t give Hoppers away,” Huang told attendees at the company’s AI conference, hyping up its latest GPU architecture. “There are circumstances where Hopper is fine. Not many.” So to now be told that chips are actually “revenue-generating assets” that are “long-lived” is… quite frankly, it’s giving me whiplash.
At least for right now, Huang isn’t wrong. The price to rent old chips has been rising, and Silicon Data projects that it will continue rising through 2028. Here’s a fun anecdote: One cloud service provider nearly doubled its prices on Nvidia Blackwell B200 chips for one rental customer during its contract renewal.
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