Nvidia Teams With Wall Street Firms to Raise $500 Billion for Customer AI Infrastructure

Major U.S. investment firms are joining with Nvidia Corp. on a $500 billion push into artificial intelligence infrastructure.

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

Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang said the company is bringing together some of the world’s leading long-term capital providers to independently fund AI infrastructure. The financing platform will help customers secure large-scale access to scarce compute capacity and build AI factories.

Huang told CNBC the money will come entirely from third-party capital, indicating the six firms will raise it from investors. BlackRock Chief Executive Officer Larry Fink told CNBC future deals will have high credit quality and could deliver attractive returns through debt investments for investors overallocated to equities.

Bloomberg reported that executives disclosed few specifics, including the timing and structure of the fundraising. The plan is focused on debt financing to help Nvidia’s biggest customers gain access to computing resources. Multiple transactions that could fall under the commitment are already in the works, Bloomberg said.

Bloomberg previously reported that Nvidia has discussed guaranteeing 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 previously said Nvidia also discussed a roughly $350 billion financing plan to help OpenAI buy Nvidia chips for the project. Wall Street firms have already committed hundreds of billions of dollars to finance the data-center construction boom, either by investing directly in facilities or acquiring operators.

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

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