Jensen Huang personally "lobbies" Wall Street: Nvidia (NVDA.US) joins forces with six major giants to turn GPUs into "golden egg-laying real estate," aiming to tap into the $500 billion compute power collateralized loan market

According to Zhitong Finance APP, Nvidia (NVDA.US) is seeking to establish its AI chips as Wall Street’s latest investable asset class. The company has partnered with six major asset management firms to push forward a $500 billion financing initiative aimed at classifying computational infrastructure alongside commercial real estate, toll roads, or other collateralizable assets, thereby providing financing support to clients.

Nvidia announced on Monday that it has signed a memorandum of understanding with Apollo Global Management, Blackstone Group, BlackRock, Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs, and KKR to jointly build a financing platform for Nvidia’s clients. Senior executives from these seven companies made a rare joint appearance on CNBC’s live interview to interpret the cooperation together.

The plan aims to mobilize more than $500 billion in third-party capital for hyperscale cloud providers, cutting-edge AI labs, and various enterprises, enabling the construction of data centers and the purchase of Nvidia hardware. This move may signal a significant shift in AI infrastructure financing—by introducing institutional credit, insurance capital, and private equity to underwrite GPUs and data centers, Nvidia helps its end users obtain financing without impacting their own balance sheets.

“This really is the first time that a technology chip has become an investable asset class,” said Nvidia’s founder and CEO Jensen Huang. “Now these chips are income-generating assets. They are productive, long-lived, interchangeable, and flexible.”

According to Huang, because Nvidia hardware is widely adopted and can be circulated among different clients, lenders can reliably treat computational power as assets with long-term yield potential.

In the past, GPUs were typically seen as rapidly depreciating hardware. Nvidia’s latest initiative is upending this traditional perception by transforming AI computational power into long-term, financeable infrastructure assets. However, skeptics may still worry whether existing AI chips can retain their value as new generations of chips are introduced.

“Fundamentally, what’s unique about this industry and this model of computing is that computers are now part of the infrastructure—like electricity or the internet—so you have to view it from an infrastructure perspective,” Huang said during the interview.

In recent years, alternative asset managers have been keen to invest funds in digital infrastructure, leveraging institutional and insurance capital to finance projects. Firms like Apollo and Blackstone have previously arranged debt and equity financing for companies such as Anthropic.

This financing action comes in the wake of July’s global market turbulence, when investors started questioning whether tech giants’ massive investments in AI would yield returns. As hyperscalers prepare to continue pouring hundreds of billions into data centers and hardware, agencies like Moody’s have warned that unprecedented capital expenditures are beginning to squeeze free cash flow and forcing tech giants to shoulder heavier debt loads.

A New Chapter in “Financial Engineering”

Wall Street leaders, including BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, Blackstone President Jon Gray, and Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, said in Monday’s press release that computational power has rapidly evolved into a key asset class driving the next phase of global economic growth.

“We are at a pivotal moment in a historic cycle of AI investment,” Solomon said in the statement. “Our role in investment and distribution reflects our confidence in Nvidia’s leadership and excites us about creating a new credit market backed by Nvidia’s computational power.”

Solomon revealed that Jensen Huang personally proposed this financing concept to Wall Street’s leading firms.

Blackstone’s Gray stated that AI computational power will be regarded as a “financeable asset class,” much like how mortgage companies view real estate assets. He noted that AI demand far outpaces supply, and Blackstone’s portfolio companies have increased their AI usage sevenfold this year.

BlackRock’s Fink believes this initiative will mark “the next future in financial engineering,” comparable to the creation of mortgage-backed securities in the 1970s. He said that some funds have already been raised, but BlackRock will “continue to significantly expand” capital raising.

“We must raise and deploy capital as quickly as possible because I think it’s crucial for the U.S. to become the global leader in AI,” Fink emphasized.