Nvidia has teamed up with major Wall Street banks including Goldman Sachs and KKR to raise $500bn (£370bn) for artificial intelligence infrastructure. The chipmaker is separately in talks to back a $500 billion data center lease for OpenAI in Ohio, underscoring a capital buildout for AI compute.
Wall Street Giants Back a New AI Asset Class
Nvidia has secured partnerships with some of Wall Street’s largest financial institutions to raise $500bn (£370bn) in capital dedicated to artificial intelligence infrastructure. The chipmaker struck deals with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR, marking the first time major banks are treating AI hardware and infrastructure as a distinct asset class.
The financing will fund projects spearheaded by Nvidia and its industry partners, targeting the construction of data centers designed to house, operate, and cool stacked computer chips. The capital will also support new manufacturing facilities to build the semiconductors required to power these systems.
“In AI, compute is revenue”, Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, said. “We are bringing the world’s leading long-term capital providers together to independently underwrite AI infrastructure.”
Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia
Major technology firms have collectively spent over $1tn, external in just three years on AI projects and infrastructure. That demand for hardware has driven Nvidia’s market value up five fold in three years over the same period.
Negotiations Over a Massive Ohio Hub for OpenAI
Beyond its banking consortium, Nvidia is engaged in discussions to provide a financing guarantee supporting OpenAI’s lease of a massive data center project planned for 2028. The US chipmaker is negotiating to help ChatGPT’s creator secure a $500 billion, 10-gigawatt hub in Ohio overseen by SoftBank Group.
According to people familiar with the matter, the chipmaker may provide a guarantee of as much as $250 billion to the AI lab. SoftBank’s subsidiary, SB Energy, is developing the complex, which would be among the largest data center installations in the world.
The talks remain in their early stages and terms could change. Alongside the lease backstop, Nvidia is separately discussing financing for OpenAI chip purchases that may total $350 billion, according to reporting cited from the Wall Street Journal.
Global Infrastructure Push and Supply Chain Ties
Chief Executive Jensen Huang is directing billions of dollars across the global supply chain to accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence and clear infrastructure bottlenecks. Nvidia is investing $1 billion in Naver to help finance an AI data center under construction and is partnering with SK Group to build more than 2 gigawatts of data centers on the Korean Peninsula.
Those regional ties provide Nvidia with improved access to high-bandwidth memory chips. South Korean suppliers SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics are the two biggest providers of those essential components, which are currently in short supply due to worldwide data center construction.
Other major tech firms are also expanding their infrastructure footprint independently. BlackRock recently entered an individual deal with Meta, external to finance and take a majority ownership stake in a Texas data center. Anthropic secured a separate deal with Macquarie Asset Management and Singapore’s GIC to fund its own compute expansion.
Circular Financing Concerns and Market Scrutiny
The scale of capital deployment has drawn scrutiny from investors worried about lofty valuations and the financial architecture supporting the boom. Market participants have raised questions over whether tech giants are outspending future revenue returns.
“While Nvidia’s investments and partnerships reinforce confidence in long-term AI buildouts, investors remain concerned about circular financing,”
Gary Tan, portfolio manager at Allspring Global Investments
Financial analysts note that while capital commitments from hardware providers help ease near-term fears that capacity demand is fading, the growing reliance on tech firms backing their own customers’ leases highlights a deeply interconnected ecosystem.
What to Watch Next
Market watchers are monitoring upcoming corporate earnings reports to gauge whether Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet will match capital expenditure increases seen across the sector. Observers are also tracking whether Google will establish similar credit-wrapper commitments for neocloud partners in its orbit, a strategy the company previously deployed with Fluidstack.
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