Nvidia found a way to build data centres without paying for them: six Wall Street firms, $500 billion, and the chips as collateral
On 10 August Nvidia announced it is setting up independent compute-financing platforms with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR, aiming to mobilise more than $500 billion of third-party capital for AI data centre buildout over time. Nvidia is not putting in its own money. The six firms create dedicated pools of capital that Nvidia's customers can draw on at better rates than they would get alone; reporting describes private placements and bonds issued through special-purpose vehicles able to raise tens of billions at a time, with the compute itself standing as security. Jensen Huang said he approached only those six and none turned him down, and made the case for chips as collateral: Nvidia compute is "broadly adopted, flexible across models and workloads, fungible and transferable across customers". Nvidia's own release notes that the partnerships still depend on final agreements being signed.
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