Wall Street giants hand Nvidia $500bn to fund boom in AI projects
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- Nvidia struck deals with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to raise $500bn (£370bn) for AI infrastructure — the first time AI hardware and infrastructure ('compute') is being treated as an asset class.
- Jensen Huang (Nvidia CEO) declared 'In AI, compute is revenue' and framed the initiative as building 'AI factories,' with funding flowing to Nvidia's own projects and partners' projects, likely including new data centres and chip fabrication plants.
- Apollo president Jim Zelter called modern compute 'a scarce, mission-critical asset class'; Apollo separately manages more than $1tn in assets.
- Nvidia chip customers — Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, SpaceX, Tesla, OpenAI, and Anthropic — have collectively spent over $1tn on AI projects in just three years, driving Nvidia's market value up fivefold.
- KKR co-chief executives Joe Bae and Scott Nuttall cautioned that 'delivery, not ambition, is the hard part,' underscoring execution risk for compute infrastructure.
- Anthropic separately struck a deal with Macquarie Asset Management and Singapore's GIC sovereign wealth fund for its own AI infrastructure investment, citing surging Claude demand for 'significant new compute'.
- Rathbones senior investment manager Jane Sydenham warned that with so much money flooding into AI projects, the question is 'are they all going to earn the right return for the future?'
Why it matters: Nvidia and its Wall Street partners are financializing the AI chip and data-centre supply chain by formalizing compute as an investable asset class. With Nvidia's customers already spending over $1tn in three years and the company's market value up fivefold, the $500bn raise institutionalizes the AI capex cycle — though skeptics like Sydenham are already flagging return risk.
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