NVIDIA Taps Apollo, BlackRock and Others to Fund $500 Bn AI Infrastructure Buildout

NVIDIA has partnered with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to create financing platforms that could mobilise more than $500 billion in third-party capital for AI infrastructure.

The partnerships are intended to help NVIDIA customers finance large-scale compute deployments, including AI factories, data centres and other infrastructure built around NVIDIA’s accelerated computing platform.

The platforms will provide financing for AI factories serving AI labs, enterprises and cloud providers. The financial institutions will independently assess projects based on customer demand, utilisation, cash flow and the residual value of the infrastructure.

The company has signed memorandums of understanding with the six financial institutions. 

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said the initiative brings a new financing model to AI infrastructure. “We have moved from an era in which companies bought chips and built data centres project by project to one in which AI factories can be financed as productive infrastructure,” he wrote in a blog on X.

Huang said NVIDIA’s AI factory model goes beyond GPUs, combining accelerated computing, networking, systems software, AI frameworks and the CUDA ecosystem.

The company argues that this infrastructure can serve multiple customers and workloads, allowing capacity to be redeployed as demand changes.

NVIDIA also cites the continued use of older hardware as evidence that its compute infrastructure retains economic value. The company said its A100 GPU, launched in 2020, remains in commercial use for AI training, fine-tuning, inference and high-performance computing.

“In AI, compute is revenue,” Huang said, arguing that the growing use of AI applications will drive demand for the infrastructure needed to run them.

NVIDIA also cited rising GPU rental prices. One-year H100 rental pricing increased from about $1.70 per GPU-hour in October 2025 to about $2.35 per GPU-hour in March, while cross-provider on-demand median pricing rose from roughly $2 to $2.70 between October 2025 and June 2026.

The financing model also addresses concerns over whether NVIDIA’s role could create a circular financing structure in which the company indirectly funds demand for its own GPUs. Huang said the initiative is intended to bring independent institutional capital into AI infrastructure, with investors making their own decisions on projects.

In some cases, NVIDIA may provide residual-value support of up to 25% of an opportunity. Huang said this support would be assessed on a project-by-project basis and would be “limited, residual-value based and designed to complement—not replace—independent underwriting.”

The financing platforms will therefore place the risk assessment with the participating financial institutions, while NVIDIA supplies the underlying AI factory platform.

Huang said the model depends on AI infrastructure being used to generate economic output rather than simply adding data centre capacity.

NVIDIA expects the model to connect demand from frontier AI labs, AI-native startups, enterprises, cloud providers and governments with institutional capital looking for long-lived infrastructure assets.

Huang described the broader thesis as a cycle in which more compute produces better AI, better AI drives usage, and increased usage creates demand for more compute.