Nvidia taps Wall Street for AI infrastructure push

Nvidia is partnering with six prominent investment firms - Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR - to raise more than $500 billion for artificial intelligence infrastructure. The chipmaker has signed memorandums of understanding with these firms to create financing platforms aimed at increasing access to computing power behind the global AI boom.

While final agreements are pending, the initiative signifies a significant shift in AI infrastructure financing. Instead of requiring technology companies and cloud providers to fund costly computing clusters through their own finances, the structure offers institutional investors a direct route into projects backed by computing equipment and usage-linked revenues.

Nvidia positions its systems as a new class of investable infrastructure, akin to assets financed through long-term infrastructure and private-credit markets. The model seeks to channel capital into "AI factories" - specialized data centres powered by Nvidia's accelerated computing systems used for training and operating AI models.

By involving firms like Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield and KKR, the financing could help organizations acquire expensive computing systems without shouldering the entire upfront cost, while providing lenders and infrastructure investors exposure to long-term demand for computing capacity.