Nvidia has partnered with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to raise $500bn for AI infrastructure projects, marking the first time Wall Street has treated computing hardware as a formal investable asset class.
"In AI, compute is revenue," Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said. "We are bringing the world's leading long-term capital providers together to independently underwrite AI infrastructure."
The financing will support new data centers and chip manufacturing facilities, addressing the physical infrastructure needed to run large-scale AI systems. For IT and development teams, this means more GPU availability for training and inference work.
These companies have collectively spent over $1tn in three years on AI projects. Demand for Nvidia's chips has driven its stock value up fivefold over the same period.
Treating compute as an asset class
The partnership structure is new. Investors including KKR and Apollo are independently underwriting AI hardware projects rather than simply funding individual companies. "Compute has become a critical infrastructure asset," Joe Bae and Scott Nuttall, co-chief executives of KKR, said in a joint statement. "As we've scaled our approach to digital infrastructure, we've learned that delivery, not ambition, is the hard part."
Jim Zelter, president of Apollo, which manages over $1tn in assets, said: "Modern compute has emerged as a scarce, mission-critical asset class." He added it is "positioned to drive significant long-term economic growth and productivity gains."
Who gets the hardware
Companies using Nvidia's popular chips include Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, SpaceX, Tesla, OpenAI and Anthropic. The new funding pool will support both Nvidia's own construction projects and those of its partners. BlackRock last month entered into an individual deal with Meta to finance a majority stake in one data center in Texas. Anthropic also recently secured its own funding from Macquarie Asset Management and GIC, a sovereign wealth fund in Singapore, for AI infrastructure.
In a statement, Huang reframed Nvidia's role beyond chip sales. "Today, we are helping create a new class of productive, investable infrastructure: AI factories," he said.
Why this matters for IT and development
Not everyone is convinced the spending will pay off. Jane Sydenham, senior investment manager at Rathbones, told the BBC: "The worry is that more and more money is going into these projects. Are they all going to earn the right return for the future?" For developers and IT professionals, the $500bn creates a practical consequence: more compute capacity means fewer hardware bottlenecks, faster model iteration, and new roles in managing AI infrastructure as a core part of the technology stack. Learning generative AI skills - through resources like AI for IT & Development or the AI for Software Developers path - aligns directly with the infrastructure buildout the industry is now financing.
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