Major U.S. investment firms are joining hands with Nvidia to set up a $500 billion (about 710 trillion won) financing platform to build artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure.
On the 10th (local time), Bloomberg and the Financial Times (FT) reported that six investment firms—Apollo, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR—issued a joint statement saying they will create a dedicated financing platform to support large-scale AI infrastructure funding for Nvidia's customers.
They plan to offer loans and financial services at competitive rates so Nvidia's customers can build AI data centers and computing infrastructure. The total funding could reach up to $500 billion.
Jensen Huang, Nvidia chief executive officer (CEO), said, "We are bringing together the world's best long-term investors to build an independent financing platform for AI infrastructure," adding, "It will help customers access scarce computing resources and build AI factories."
Huang said in a CNBC interview that all of the funds will be raised as third-party capital. This means the six investment firms will raise money from institutional investors and supply it to Nvidia's customers.
Larry Fink, BlackRock CEO, also said in a CNBC interview, "This platform is based on high-creditworthiness transactions and could offer attractive liability investment opportunities for investors with high equity exposure."
Bloomberg reported that while the exact timing and structure of the financing were not disclosed, the platform is likely to focus on large-scale project financing for Nvidia customers' AI infrastructure build-outs. Multiple transactions that could use the platform are already underway.
A representative case is a 10-gigawatt (GW) data center campus project promoted by SB Energy, a subsidiary of SoftBank Group, in Ohio. Bloomberg reported that Nvidia is discussing providing up to $250 billion in financial guarantees on the premise of OpenAI leasing the data centers, which, if concluded, could become the largest financing support in Nvidia's history.
Nvidia has also reportedly reviewed a roughly $350 billion financing plan to support OpenAI's purchases of AI chips for the project.
On Wall Street, financial support is expanding rapidly in step with increased investment in AI data centers. Investment firms are entering the market by investing directly in data centers or acquiring operators. Earlier in 2024, BlackRock, Microsoft, and MGX, an investment company in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), launched a consortium to invest in AI data centers.