Chip giant Nvidia has announced strategic partnerships with a range of major financial institutions that it said will mobilise more than half a trillion dollars of third-party capital over time for the buildout of AI infrastructure.

Nvidia revealed Tuesday that it had signed deals to establish independent compute financing platforms with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR. Nvidia will work these firms to offer dedicated pools of capital “at attractive rates” for Nvidia customers seeking to build compute capacity.

Jensen Huang, founder and chief executive of Nvidia, described the partnerships as the beginning of a “new class of productive, investible infrastructure”.

“In AI, compute is revenue,” he continued. “Nvidia compute is uniquely suited for this role […] That is why we are bringing the world’s leading long-term capital providers together to independently underwrite AI infrastructure. These financing platforms will help customers access scarce compute at scale and build the DSX AI factories that will power every industry and country in the age of AI.”

The exact details of the agreements are not yet clear, but comments from the heads of the financial services providers suggest that these pools will allow their private clients to offer credit to firms planning to build out AI infrastructure using Nvidia’s products.

David Solomon, chairman and chief executive of Goldman Sachs said: “Our investment and distribution roles reflect our confidence in NVIDIA’s leadership, and we’re excited for the new opportunity to create a market for credit backed by NVIDIA compute.”

Similar sentiments were expressed by the heads of the other firms involved.

Nvidia itself remains a major investor in AI infrastructure developed using its own technology. Most recently, it was reportedly considering an investment of $250 billion in a datacentre build by OpenAI.

While large, these investments, and corresponding investments from AI companies into Nvidia, have been criticised by some experts as ‘circular financing’, suggesting that money is being moved without necessarily corresponding to value created.

This latest tranche of deals do not seem to have assuaged these fears; Nvidia stock fell 2.86 per cent Monday after the news broke.

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