Nvidia and Wall Street team up on $500 billion bet on AI infrastructure | CNN Business

London — 

Nvidia is joining forces with Wall Street to allow its customers borrow more than half a trillion dollars to build AI infrastructure.

The US chipmaker announced on Monday that it had signed a preliminary agreement with heavyweight institutional investors Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to raise over $500 billion for lending.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement shared on X that AI compute — the hardware and software underpinning AI models — was developing into an “investable asset class” that he referred to as “AI factories.”

“We have moved from an era in which companies bought chips and built data centers project by project to one in which AI factories can be financed as productive infrastructure,” Huang wrote.

The future financing platforms are partly intended to make it easier for smaller, start-up AI companies to borrow money to buy compute, which is the processing power needed to train and build their models.

“Modern compute has emerged as a scarce, mission-critical asset class with compelling investment characteristics,” Apollo President Jim Zelter said in a statement.

Nvidia is at the center of the AI boom, manufacturing chips and other hardware used in a raft of tech…