Nvidia partners with Wall Street giants to raise $500 billion for AI buildout

By Juby Babu and Isla Binnie

Aug 10 (Reuters) - Nvidia said on Monday it has partnered with six major financial institutions to launch compute financing platforms aimed at raising over $500 billion in third-party capital for AI infrastructure.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on X that the company has the option to backstop up to $125 billion, or 25% of the poential deals.

The move highlights how surging demand for AI computing capacity is drawing institutional investors, as governments, companies and startups race to build out data centers to support AI workloads.

Big Tech companies have signaled that spending on AI would ​not slow down, with combined outlays set to surpass $730 billion this year.

Nvidia signed memorandums of understanding with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR for the financing platforms. 

The initiative is intended to broaden access to Nvidia-based infrastructure among frontier AI developers, enterprises, governments and cloud providers, while creating longer-duration, usage-linked investment opportunities for large asset managers and private capital firms.

"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," Huang said.

Nvidia said the arrangements would "create dedicated pools of capital at significant scale at attractive rates" for its customers.

The company did not disclose the financial terms, investment commitments by individual firms or a timetable for deploying the planned $500 billion.

The Financial Times had reported the development first on Monday, later confirmed by Reuters. 

(Reporting by Isla Binnie in New York and Juby Babu in Mexico City, additional reporting by Max A. Cherney in San Francisco; Editing by Jonathan Ananda and Shinjini Ganguli)