Nvidia has teamed up with some of Wall Street's largest banks and investors to raise $500bn in capital for artificial intelligence infrastructure. The chipmaker said it had struck deals with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR, treating AI hardware as an asset class.

"In AI, compute is revenue," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said. "We are bringing the world's leading long-term capital providers together to independently underwrite AI infrastructure." The financing will go towards Nvidia’s own projects and those being built by its partners.

The infrastructure projects backed by this fund will likely include the construction of new data centres, new factories for manufacturing AI chips, and increasing their availability. "Compute has become a critical infrastructure asset," Joe Bae and Scott Nuttall, co-chief executives of KKR, said in a joint statement. "As we've scaled our approach to digital infrastructure, delivery is now the hard part."

Companies like Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, SpaceX, Tesla, OpenAI and Anthropic have collectively spent over $1tn on AI projects and infrastructure in just three years, with much more spending expected. This demand for Nvidia's chips has driven the company’s stock market value up fivefold in three years.

"Modern compute has emerged as a scarce, mission-critical asset class," said Jim Zelter, president of Apollo, which manages over $1tn in assets. "It is positioned to drive significant long-term economic growth and productivity gains." However, there are concerns that the increasing amount of money going into these projects may not yield the right return for the future.