Nvidia signed memorandums of understanding with Apollo Global Management, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs and KKR to establish financing platforms for its customers, aiming to mobilise more than $500 billion in third-party capital for hyperscalers, frontier AI labs and enterprises to build data centres and acquire Nvidia hardware, CNBC reported on 10 August. Executives from the seven firms joined CNBC’s Becky Quick in a joint interview.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said: “This is really the first time that technology chips have become an investable asset class. These are revenue-generating assets now. They’re productive, they’re long-lived, they’re fungible, they’re flexible.” Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said in a news release: “We’re in a pivotal moment of a historic AI investment cycle.” Blackstone president Jon Gray called AI compute a “financeable asset class” and said use at Blackstone portfolio companies had increased sevenfold this year. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink described the project as the “next future for financial engineering” and said: “We need to raise this money as fast as possible and put this to work.”
CNBC noted Moody’s had warned that unprecedented AI capex is squeezing free cash flow and forcing tech companies into heavier debt.
