GPUs Become Financial Assets: Jensen Huang Teams Up with Wall Street for $500B Funding

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announced partnerships with Apollo Global Management, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR to create independent financing platforms designed to attract over $500 billion in third-party capital for building AI infrastructure. Huang introduced the concept of NVIDIA AI factories—full computing platforms of GPUs, networking, software, and CUDA—as productive infrastructure assets that can generate income and appreciate via software upgrades. He emphasized the residual value support, where NVIDIA might back up to 25% of a project's residual value on a case-by-case basis. The announcement drew parallels to the Stargate project's $500 billion investment by OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle. Critics compare this to vendor financing during the dot-com bubble, warning of potential debt risks if AI demand underperforms. NVIDIA's CDS reached historic highs, and the article discusses whether the financing is a virtuous cycle or a bubble.