Nvidia has agreed deals with several of Wall Street's biggest financial firms to help raise $500bn (£370bn) to fund the build-out of artificial intelligence infrastructure, including data centres and chip factories. The move marks a shift in how banks view AI hardware, or "compute", which is now being treated as a distinct investable asset class in its own right, reflecting the scale of capital that tech firms are pouring into AI development.

The financing partners include Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR, with funds going towards both Nvidia's own projects and those of its partners. Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang described the effort as creating "a new class of productive, investable infrastructure: AI factories". Major tech firms such as Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic, which rely heavily on Nvidia's chips, have collectively spent more than $1tn on AI infrastructure in three years, a boom that has driven Nvidia's stock market value up fivefold over the same period.