Nvidia gets $500bn from major banks to develop AI data centres
BBC News ● Covered by 3 sources
Nvidia and big banks are putting $500bn into AI data centres and chip factories. Wall Street now treats AI hardware like its own asset class, which says a lot about where the money is going.
Based on reporting by BBC News — read the original for the full story.
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Nvidia has lined up some of Wall Street’s biggest names to help fund a $500bn push into AI infrastructure. Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR are all in the mix, and Nvidia says the banks are now treating AI hardware — or “compute” — as a separate asset class.
That matters because the company is no longer just selling chips into a boom. It is helping build the thing that boom runs on. The money is meant for Nvidia’s own projects and for work being done with partners, including new data centres to store, run and cool racks of chips, plus factories to make more AI chips.
Jensen Huang has been pushing the idea hard. On Monday he called AI infrastructure a new kind of “productive, investable” asset and said, “In AI, compute is revenue.” KKR’s co-chief executives, Joe Bae and Scott Nuttall, made a similar point in plainer language: the hard part is delivering these projects, not dreaming them up.
The scale explains why the banks want in. Nvidia’s chips, or GPUs, are used by nearly every big player in tech and AI, including Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, SpaceX, Tesla, OpenAI and Anthropic. Those companies have already spent more than $1tn on AI projects and infrastructure over the past three years, and Nvidia says its own market value has risen fivefold in that time.
This is also a way for lenders to finance more of the AI boom without pretending it is cheap or simple. Apollo’s Jim Zelter called modern compute a scarce, mission-critical asset, and BlackRock recently struck its own deal with Meta for a data centre in Texas. Anthropic, meanwhile, has said it needs more financing because demand for Claude is forcing it to seek far more compute.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is what happens when a boom gets big enough to invent a new asset class and call it prudence. The interesting part isn’t that banks want exposure; it’s that AI now needs enough steel, power and cooling to look less like software and more like a utility with better branding. That should make the hype crowd nervous, which is usually a sign something real is happening.
Read more about this at: BBC News
