AI's future runs through credit desks

In August, Nvidia brought together Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR to build financing platforms that could mobilize more than $500 billion for AI infrastructure. That is not a side project. It is a sign that the company’s future depends on something bigger than chip design: whether customers can actually afford the machines it sells.

The deeper point is even broader. AI is moving from a story about model launches and compute shortages to a story about who can raise money cheaply and at scale. That shift favors the United States, with capital markets deeper than anyone else’s. For China and Europe, the route to catching up is increasingly financial as much as technical.

This is what makes the Nvidia move unusual. Project finance has long been used for things like power plants, toll roads, and airports, where big upfront spending is repaid over time. Here, the goal is to make compute look more like an infrastructure asset that pension funds and insurers can own. But GPUs wear out quickly, AI demand is hard to predict, and the returns are still unclear.

And yet the alternative is obvious: even the biggest tech companies are struggling to fund the buildout from cash alone. The five largest American hyperscalers are on track to spend $730 billion on capital expenditure in 2026, and they are expected to finance up to a third of that with debt. If the richest players need leverage, smaller ones need a financial system that can do more than cheer from the sidelines.

Europe, in particular, looks stuck. Eurozone households hold about 10 trillion euros, roughly $11 trillion, in bank deposits, but much of that money is not finding its way into local startups. China has the opposite problem: after a state-driven buildout, Chinese media reported last year that as much as 80% of newly built computing capacity sat unused. The Stanford HAI AI Index 2026 says private AI investment in the U.S. was more than 23 times China’s last year. The next AI race will not just be about who invents the best system. It will be about who can finance it without tripping over their own shoelaces.