Nvidia Lines Up $500 Billion in AI Financing With Six Wall Street Asset Managers

Nvidia has signed memorandums of understanding with six major Wall Street firms — Apollo Global Management, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs, and KKR — to establish financing platforms designed to mobilize more than $500 billion in third-party capital for AI infrastructure, the company said Monday.

The effort is structured to treat AI compute capacity the way institutional lenders have historically treated commercial real estate, toll roads, and other long-lived infrastructure assets. Hyperscalers, frontier AI labs, and enterprises would be able to borrow against Nvidia hardware and data centers without drawing down their own balance sheets.

"This is really the first time that technology chips have become an investable asset class," Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC. "These are revenue-generating assets now. They're productive, they're long-lived, they're fungible, they're flexible."

Huang made the case that because Nvidia's hardware is broadly adopted and transferable across customers, lenders can reliably underwrite compute as a revenue-generating asset with an extended useful life — a direct challenge to the conventional view of GPUs as rapidly depreciating hardware.

Executives from all seven companies appeared together in a live joint interview on CNBC to discuss the announcement, a rare occurrence for firms that typically guard their deal-making activity closely.

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon framed the moment in the broadest possible terms. "We're in a pivotal moment of a historic AI investment cycle," Solomon said in the news release. "Our investment and distribution roles reflect our confidence in NVIDIA's leadership, and we're excited for the new opportunity to create a market for credit backed by NVIDIA compute."

Blackstone President Jon Gray said AI compute will be seen as a "financeable asset class" in the same way mortgage lenders look at homes, and noted that AI use at Blackstone portfolio companies has surged sevenfold this year.

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said he viewed the project as the beginning of the "next future for financial engineering," drawing a comparison to the creation of mortgage-backed securities in the 1970s. "We need to raise this money as fast as possible and put this to work, because I think it's really imperative that the United States is the leader in AI in the world," Fink said on CNBC. He added that some funds have already been raised and that BlackRock will be "raising quite a bit more."

The announcement comes after a July downturn in global markets during which investors questioned whether Big Tech's AI spending would generate sufficient returns. Rating agencies including Moody's have warned that capital expenditures at major technology companies are squeezing free cash flow and pushing firms toward heavier debt loads, underscoring the urgency behind Nvidia's push to find alternative financing channels for its customers.

Alternative asset managers including Apollo and Blackstone have already structured debt and equity financing for AI companies — Apollo and Blackstone are among those that have previously backed Anthropic.

Huang approached the Wall Street firms about the financing concept himself, Goldman's Solomon told CNBC.

The $500 billion target, if realized, would represent a structural shift in how AI infrastructure spending is funded — moving a meaningful share of capital deployment off corporate balance sheets and into institutional credit and insurance markets. Whether AI chips can retain sufficient residual value across hardware generations to function reliably as long-term collateral remains an open question that lenders and regulators will face as the platforms take shape.

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