Jensen Huang Has a $500 Billion Plan to Finance AI

Wall Street’s biggest financial firms are backing Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s plan to mobilize hundreds of billions of dollars for artificial intelligence infrastructure, potentially shifting the financing of the AI boom away from corporate balance sheets and toward asset-based investment.

Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Blackstone, KKR, Apollo and Brookfield said they were prepared to raise $500 billion, and potentially more, from institutional investors to finance the construction and expansion of AI infrastructure.

Huang described the initiative as a “big concept” in an interview with CNBC. The companies argue that AI infrastructure is emerging as a new asset class as chipmakers, cloud providers and other technology companies race to meet growing demand for computing capacity.

“These systems are not like our PCs, not like our phones,” Huang said. “These are revenue-generating assets now. They’re productive, they’re long lived, they’re fungible, they’re flexible.”

The announcement provided few details about the borrowers, interest rates, locations of facilities or timing. The companies said they had signed memoranda of understanding, rather than binding contracts.

The financing initiative comes as technology companies have committed record amounts of capital to data centers, AI chips and related infrastructure. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle have collectively raised more than $150 billion this year through debt and equity offerings to fund data centers, AI models and AI agents.

Intel on Monday announced a $15 billion stock offering and later increased the size to $20 billion. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said the growing value of AI infrastructure was creating opportunities for asset-backed financing.

“You’re starting to see, in a sense, you know, asset-based financing against this infrastructure buildout,” Solomon said on the CNBC panel. “That’s not surprising because these are real assets. They have real value.”

Under the proposed model, AI computing systems equipped with Nvidia graphics processing units could be treated as productive assets capable of generating revenue rather than simply as equipment purchased by technology companies.

Nvidia says its CUDA software can enable systems to be upgraded and extend their useful lives, potentially improving their economics.

“You can think about it as a revenue stream, and you can securitize it or effectively divide that risk and sell it to investors who want to participate anywhere in that stack,” said Szlezak, KKR’s head of digital infrastructure.

The growing use of securitization raises questions about the risks associated with financing AI infrastructure. The global financial crisis of 2007-2009 was exacerbated by the collapse of securities backed by subprime mortgages after defaults increased.

Michael Burry, the investor who became known for betting against subprime mortgages, said late last year that companies including Meta, Oracle, Microsoft, Google and Amazon were overstating the useful lives of their AI chips and understating depreciation.

Several financiers involved in the initiative acknowledged that the AI investment boom could experience setbacks.

“There will be excesses, there will be pullbacks,” said Jim Zelter, president of Apollo Global Management, adding that the number of participants in the project alleviates concentration concerns.

“There’ll be big companies that win,” Solomon said. “There’ll be big companies that turn out to be not what people expected.”

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink compared the development to the early stages of the mortgage-backed securities market, highlighting the potential for new forms of financial engineering around AI infrastructure.

“This is the very beginning, like what it was when I started in the mortgage-backed securities market in the 1970s,” Fink said. “I look upon this as as a next future for financial engineering.”

Under the proposed structure, each of the six financial firms would make its own lending decisions, Huang said. Nvidia would connect prospective borrowers with financing partners.

Nvidia would have the option to backstop 25% of each loan, a structure Huang said could help companies secure more favorable interest rates than they might obtain based solely on their own credit ratings.

Borrowers would be required to use Nvidia-specified system architectures designed so another company could take over and operate the infrastructure if necessary, Huang said.

The initiative is still being developed, but the announcement underscored the scale of capital that financial institutions believe could be deployed to support the next phase of AI infrastructure investment.

“Jensen’s leading this to create structures,” Flatt said. “Because there’s hundreds of trillions of dollars of money in the world.”

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