Nvidia Partners With Wall Street for $500 Billion AI Fund

Nvidia Corporation has partnered with Apollo Global Management, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs, and KKR to establish financing platforms aimed at mobilizing over $500 billion for AI infrastructure. The initiative seeks to transform AI chips and computing capacity into a long-lived, investable asset class similar to real estate or power plants. Under this plan, customers can finance expensive data centers and GPUs through institutional credit, with Nvidia potentially guaranteeing up to 25% of the collateral based on residual value.

Parallel to this financial push, Nvidia disclosed a stake of approximately 122.8 million Class A shares in Space Exploration Technologies Corp., valued at $21 billion as of June 30. This position resulted from a $10 billion investment in xAI, which SpaceX acquired in February. During SpaceX's first public earnings call, Elon Musk confirmed the company will build its AI data centers exclusively using Nvidia's upcoming Vera Rubin architecture.

Nvidia is also expanding its physical footprint, providing a $105 billion backstop and a $1.5 billion investment for a massive data center project in Ohio. Developed by SB Energy, a Softbank subsidiary, the facility will be leased to OpenAI for 20 years.

While executives like Larry Fink and David Solomon praised the move as essential for U.S. leadership in AI, critics have raised alarms. Jeffrey Gundlach warned that using fast-evolving technology as collateral for long-term debt is risky, while Mark Cuban compared the concept of chips as an asset class to cryptocurrency.