Nvidia goes beyond chips; teams up with Wall Street for a $500 billion AI buildout

Nvidia has partnered with some of the world’s biggest investment firms to mobilise more than $500 billion in third-party capital for artificial intelligence infrastructure, as the chipmaker looks to help finance the enormous cost of building data centres and computing capacity needed for the AI boom.

The company has signed memorandums of understanding with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to create independent financing platforms for AI infrastructure. The platforms will create dedicated pools of capital that Nvidia’s customers can access to build AI factories — large-scale facilities that provide computing power for training and running AI models.

The announcement comes as AI companies, cloud providers, governments and enterprises race to expand their computing capacity. The cost of building these facilities is becoming one of the biggest constraints on the next phase of AI growth, with projects requiring not only Nvidia chips but also data centres, electricity, networking equipment and other infrastructure.

“This is an important milestone. We began by building chips; today, we are helping create a new class of productive, investable infrastructure: AI factories,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said. “In AI, compute is revenue,” Huang added.

The idea is to treat computing capacity as an infrastructure asset that can attract long-term institutional investment, rather than requiring technology companies to fund each data centre project themselves.

Nvidia said the financing platforms are intended to give customers access to computing capacity at attractive rates. The capital will support infrastructure across Nvidia’s ecosystem, including AI labs, enterprises and AI cloud providers.

Apollo President Jim Zelter said modern computing had become a “scarce, mission-critical asset class” with characteristics that could support long-term investment.

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said the AI buildout would require “unprecedented investment” and a skilled workforce. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said Nvidia’s position in the AI infrastructure market could help create “a market for credit backed by NVIDIA compute.”

For Nvidia, the move is significant because it expands its role beyond supplying chips. The company is increasingly trying to influence how the infrastructure around those chips is built and financed. This could help address a key bottleneck for Nvidia--customers need access to enormous amounts of capital to buy its systems and build the facilities required to operate them.

Nvidia said the platforms are intended to mobilise more than $500 billion of third-party capital “over time”. The partnerships are also still subject to final agreements, meaning the actual amount deployed and the timing remain uncertain.

Nvidia’s own investment commitments

The latest announcement also comes as Nvidia has increasingly put its own capital behind the AI infrastructure ecosystem. In September 2025, Nvidia announced plans to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI progressively as OpenAI deployed at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems. In January 2026, Nvidia invested $2 billion in AI cloud company CoreWeave as part of a wider plan to help the company build more than 5 gigawatts of AI factories by 2030. Nvidia has also participated as an anchor limited partner in a financing structure supporting a $5.4 billion data-centre transaction involving xAI and Nvidia GPUs.