Nvidia teams up with Wall Street giants to raise $500bn for AI infrastructure

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

The chipmaker said it had struck deals with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR, and that the investors were for the first time treating AI hardware and infrastructure, often referred to as "compute", as an 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 go towards Nvidia's own projects and those being built by its partners.

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

It will also back new factories to manufacture the AI chips needed to power these systems and increase their availability to buyers.

"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.

"Nvidia is absolutely enormous and produces these chips that everybody needs for AI and it needs to keep facilitating the growth of AI," Jane Sydenham, senior investment manager at Rathbones, told the BBC.

However, she added: "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?"