Nvidia, Wall Street Firms Launch $500 Billion Push to Finance Client AI Infrastructure

Major US investment firms are teaming up with Nvidia Corp. to invest $500 billion in artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Apollo Global Management Inc., Blackstone Inc., BlackRock Inc., Brookfield Asset Management Ltd., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and KKR & Co. Inc. said in a statement on August 10 that they would create a dedicated funding pool for Nvidia customers at attractive interest rates, according to Bloomberg News, the Financial Times and other media reports.

“We are bringing together leading long-term capital providers from around the world to finance AI infrastructure independently,” Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang said in the statement. “This financial platform will help customers gain large-scale access to scarce compute resources and build AI factories.”

Huang told CNBC that all of the funding would come from third-party capital, indicating that the six firms would raise money from their investors. BlackRock Chief Executive Officer Larry Fink told CNBC the future deals would carry “high credit quality” and could offer attractive returns through debt investments to investors who are “overweight” equities.

Bloomberg reported that few details, including the timing and structure of the financing, have been disclosed. Executives said the plan would focus on debt financing to help Nvidia’s biggest customers secure access to computing resources. Bloomberg also said multiple deals that could fall under the commitment are already in progress.

Bloomberg had previously reported that Nvidia was discussing a plan to guarantee as much as $250 billion for a project by SB Energy, a SoftBank Group subsidiary, to develop a 10-gigawatt data center campus in Ohio that OpenAI could lease in the future. If completed, it would be Nvidia’s largest financing deal with a customer.

People familiar with the matter said at the time that Nvidia had also discussed a financing plan worth about $350 billion to help OpenAI buy Nvidia chips for the project. Wall Street firms have already committed hundreds of billions of dollars to fund the data-center construction boom, either by investing directly in data centers or by acquiring the companies that operate them.

Two years ago, BlackRock, Microsoft Corp. and MGX, an investment vehicle from the United Arab Emirates, formed a consortium to finance data centers.

Park Su-bin, Hankyung.com reporter waterbean@hankyung.com