Nvidia enlists Wall Street titans to bankroll $500 billion AI buildout

Nvidia has partnered with six of Wall Street's largest investment firms, including Apollo, Blackstone, BlackRock and Goldman Sachs, to source $500 billion in financing for artificial intelligence infrastructure. The financing will primarily take the form of debt, using compute power as collateral, and is aimed at helping Nvidia's biggest customers access chips and build data centres. CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia approached only these six firms and all agreed to participate. The announcement comes as investors raise concerns about circular deals inflating AI demand, with analysts cautioning that the debt-based structure makes future compute demand more sensitive to credit market conditions..By Silla Brush, Ian King and Todd Gillespie.US investment giants including Apollo Global Management Inc., Blackstone Inc., BlackRock Inc. and Brookfield Asset Management are partnering with Nvidia Corp. to source $500 billion in financing for artificial intelligence infrastructure. The coalition, which also includes Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and KKR & Co., will “create dedicated pools of capital at significant scale at attractive rates for Nvidia customers,” according to a statement Monday. Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang said in a CNBC interview that he approached only the six firms for the commitment, and none turned him down.The effort comes with a huge headline figure but few details on the timing and structure of the financing, or how much the plan goes beyond the string of AI deals that are already driving a large chunk of Wall Street’s biggest transactions. Executives indicated that it will focus on debt financing to provide access to compute for Nvidia’s largest customers and that there are already many deals in the works that would qualify toward this commitment.“We are bringing the world’s leading long-term capital providers together to independently underwrite AI infrastructure,” Huang said in the statement. “These financing platforms will help customers access scarce compute at scale and build the AI factories that will power every industry and country in the age of AI.”Nvidia has already signed hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of deals with companies across the AI ecosystem, stoking concerns from some investors that the chipmaking giant is inflating demand and valuations across the industry through the circular nature of such agreements. Its graphics processing units, the best hardware for accelerating AI work, are by far the biggest expense items in the data center buildout.“In effect, they made Nvidia’s product cheaper without really cutting GPU prices,” said Felix Wang, managing director of global technology at Hedgeye Risk Management. “But it also makes future demand more sensitive to credit conditions, credit volatility, and raises a lot of questions on what we consider to be real demand.”The firm is now publicly tapping the biggest private markets firms to provide funding for its customers amid the trillions of dollars that are expected to be needed for the data centers, power stations and chips that will power the next era of AI.The money will all be third-party capital, Huang said in the CNBC interview, which also featured executives from each of the six Wall Street firms.BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said on CNBC the future deals will offer “high credit quality” and allow attractive yields in debt for investors who are “overinvested in equities.”“It’s a big infrastructure build, and the capital markets are signaling that there’s lots of capital available to support it,” Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said, adding that his firm is trying to find different ways of “getting the capital to the right places to extend this or accelerate this.”The deals will use compute power as collateral for the debt, which will take the form of private offerings as well as bonds by special-purpose entities, according to a person familiar with the matter. Those vehicles could issue as much as tens of billions of dollars in debt at a time and then lease the compute to Nvidia’s clients, said the person, who asked not to be identified discussing private plans.Such deals are set to start coming to market within months, the person said. The compute is also liquid, which means financing could be reallocated to different buyers of the compute, helping reduce the risk to debt investors.As the only bank in the partnership, Goldman Sachs is positioning itself to be the lead bookrunner on the public debt deals coming to market for the deal. It will also gather investment returns from debt distributed through its asset-management arm, which oversees more than $4 trillion in assets.“AI isn’t necessarily a bubble, but the market needs an earnings reality check,” said Terri Spath, founder and chief investment officer of Zuma Wealth. “We’re very bullish on the earnings power of AI — where we exercise some caution is the price that investors pay for that growth.”Nvidia’s Financing DemandsIn a post on X, Huang characterized Nvidia’s compute as “an investable infrastructure asset” and noted that the company may provide some financing support of “up to 25% of an opportunity.”“Our role is to help unlock a very large pool of independent capital while maintaining disciplined risk exposure,” he wrote.Nvidia had already been in talks to backstop as much as $250 billion to help OpenAI lease computing power from the $500 billion, 10-gigawatt data center hub that SB Energy, a SoftBank Group Corp. subsidiary, is developing in Ohio, Bloomberg reported last month. It would easily be among the chipmaker’s biggest financing deals with a customer.Nvidia was also in discussions to finance $350 billion of OpenAI’s purchases of its chips for the project, people familiar with the situation said at the time, asking not to be identified because the talks were private.Wall Street firms have similarly poured hundreds of billions of dollars into financing the worldwide AI data center boom, directly investing in sites and buying the companies that operate them.Two years ago, firms including BlackRock, Microsoft Corp. and the United Arab Emirates’ MGX investment vehicle formed what’s now known as the AI Infrastructure Partnership to bankroll data centers. Nvidia committed to supporting the coalition. .Read more:.Nvidia's trillion-dollar reset: Cheapest since 2019 despite record profits.Nvidia has accelerated its investments and partnerships with tech and AI companies in recent months despite growing concerns about its “circular” deals.In addition to the OpenAI financing talks, the company last month expanded a partnership with South Korean conglomerate SK Group and said the companies will be doing more than $500 billion in business with each other. It also made a “substantial” investment in Safe Superintelligence Inc., the AI startup co-founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever..© 2026 Bloomberg L.P..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here. 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Nvidia enlists Wall Street titans to bankroll $500 billion AI buildout

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