Nvidia gets $500bn from major banks to develop AI data centres

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has seen his company's value soar amid the AI boom in tech.

Nvidia has teamed up with some of Wall Street's largest banks to help raise $500bn (£370bn) in capital to develop artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure.

The chipmaker said it had struck deals with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR, and that the banks were for the first time treating AI hardware and infrastructure, often referred to as "compute", as a separate asset class.

"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."

The financing will go towards Nvidia's own projects and those being built by its partners.

Infrastructure projects backed by this fund will include the construction of new data centres to house, operate, and cool miles of stacked computer chips that process AI data and actions.

This will also back new factories to manufacture the AI chips needed to power these systems.

"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."

Essentially every major technology and AI company uses Nvidia's computer chips, or graphics processing units (GPUs), to power their services, AI platforms and AI chatbots.

Companies using Nvidia's popular chips or GPUs include Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, SpaceX, Tesla, OpenAI and Anthropic.

Such companies have collectively spent over $1tn , external in just three years on AI projects and infrastructure, with much more spending expected. And their demand for Nvidia's chips and services has driven the stock market value of the company up five fold in three years.

In a statement on Monday, Huang referred to Nvidia's role as a chip-maker as the company's beginning.

"Today, we are helping create a new class of productive, investable infrastructure: AI factories," he said.

With a new ability to tap some funding from the banks partnering with Nvidia, such banks will be able to finance more of the AI boom.